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Expert staff

Learn from multidisciplinary experts including academics, entrepreneurs, designers and innovation consultants, who bring their expertise to help you challenge established thinking and create novel products and services.

Experiential learning

Learn by doing as you study alongside students from other subjects in our dynamic studio-based environment. You will complete real world projects in each year, often working with external clients and partners to think up your own solutions to current and future issues.

Award winning

We were honoured with the Advance HE Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (2019), the National HE Team Enterprise Educator Award (2018), and Highly Commended for Innovation in Education by the National Enterprise Network (2020).

Innovation at Bristol

Do you want to change the world? Our innovation courses will set you on your way.

Innovation is the application of creative solutions to real-world problems - taken all the way to delivery.

Students from varied academic backgrounds bring together their knowledge and passion to identify social and commercial opportunities. Staff from industry and academic experts teach the skills to collaborate, research and implement real projects for real clients, turning ideas into practice.

You may want to design products or services; dream up new forms of social interaction; start a company supplying innovative products or services; establish a social enterprise; or bring your own ideas to life.

You will experience working with others who bring their own specialist knowledge, background and ways of thinking to the course, as well as building an understanding of how to design products and services. Working with external clients on projects they value, learn how to develop your own ideas and plans, evaluate innovative solutions and present them to gain support.

What made Bristol stand out was its inclusivity - there is an opportunity for everyone to get involved. I enjoy the external speakers who come in to share their experiences, deepening the interface between academia and industry.

TALHAH, MARTS FILM AND TELEVISION WITH INNOVATION

Career prospects

A student talking while writing a mindmap on a flipchart.

After graduating, you will be able to progress to careers that require an honours degree in your chosen subject specialism. However, you will also be equipped to do much more: to innovate; to work in teams with people from different specialisms, backgrounds and cultures; and to create and implement entrepreneurial plans to take ideas forward. These skills are highly valued by all organisations, large or small, local or global - our recent graduates have secured employment at established consultancies, government agencies, record labels, fashion companies and more.??

You may graduate as a member of a new venture that you and your fellow students have created, or you may decide to join an existing venture. Whatever you decide, you will be well equipped to continue building on your entrepreneurial and innovation experience.

Course structure

Three students smile while working together in a teaching space.

In your first two years, you will spend up to two thirds of your time in your core discipline and one third studying innovation. In later years, you spend a greater proportion of your time studying innovation where you get to combine your skills as part of an integrated master's programme.?

In the first year, you will find out about design and systems thinking, which combine creative and analytic approaches to design and take a wider view of how systems interlink. Working alongside other students, you will also study futures - constructing future scenarios and designing far into the future using creative and speculative methods.??

In your second year, you will investigate innovative working practices and devise and pitch solutions to real clients. You will also learn about the technological, social and political influences on design and innovation. In your third year, you will develop your own innovative and disruptive ideas. You will learn how to develop and realise your ideas and build feasible plans to bring them into the world.???

Your final-year project allows you to deepen and mature your knowledge by pulling together all you have learned in a major final project. You will develop new insights about an area of innovation that interests you and produce a portfolio to showcase your work from the programme.?

You will combine undergraduate and postgraduate study into one with our four-year master's degrees. Become an expert in your discipline while learning how to create new products and services, work in teams across specialisms, and create and implement entrepreneurial plans

Challenge-led learning

Red lights in the evening at We the Curious in Millennium Square, Bristol.

Our studio-based, challenge-led learning space allows staff to interact with students, creating a dynamic learning environment which breaks away from the traditional lecture/seminar approach.

As part of the course you will be able to interact with multi-disciplinary academics, designers, entrepreneurs and industry professionals in the classroom and in our dedicated prototyping studio.?

The Centre for Innovation is also home to project Runway - a pre incubation programme for student entrepreneurs offering funding, mentorship and entrepreneurial knowledge. It is open to all students and graduates from across the University of Bristol up to two years after graduation.

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