A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Panayiotis Ketikidis et al.
industry placement, business game), extra-curricular (entrepreneurs society, commercialisation and
mentoring programmes, enterprise/business week, sabbatical exchange of academics, workshops)
and business plan competition. However, for the case of inter-disciplinary entrepreneurship education,
which according to (Brand et al., 2006) is the future direction of this field, all these activities must
include an inter-disciplinary pillar.
Apart from investigating the enablers (reasons & actions) of delivering inter-disciplinary
entrepreneurship education in post graduate studies there also exists the requirement of knowing the
potential blockers that may interfere with the desired successful outcomes. These blockers must be
carefully identified and avoided/mitigated. To this extent, (Hamouda et al., 2009) identified the
following potential blockers: rigidity of programmatic structures, lack of coordination for academic
centres, changing the mindset of academics, effective communication with potential students, low
staff incentives and the impact of modularisation and semesterisation. To the same extent, (Brand et
al., 2006) identifies another potential blocker, namely the heterogeneity of the group of scholars that
lack an integrative framework (Kuratko & Hodgetts, 2001), aspect which may decrease the quality of
the inter-disciplinary programme delivery.
Many academic institutions throughout the world currently provide entrepreneurship studies for nonbusiness
students. (EC, 2008) and (Socrates, 2006b) provide many examples of such universities
from different countries of the European Union such as the Northern Ireland Centre for
Entrepreneurship (IE), the University of Cambridge (UK), the University of Strathclyde (UK) and Turku
University (FI), which have excelled in delivering entrepreneurship education for non business
students. The case, however, of CITY College that delivers a postgraduate entrepreneurship
programme for non-business students in an international environment is rather unique and is
discussed in detail in the following chapter.
3. The MSc in business management and technology
3.1 CITY College – the infrastructure of the MSc in BMT
CITY College is a private higher education college founded in 1989, in Thessaloniki, Greece (City
College, 2012). Since 1993 and for sixteen years, the college was an Affiliated Institution of The
University of Sheffield. The Affiliation status was never previously awarded by the University of
Sheffield to an academic institution outside the UK and reflected the high academic standards of the
college and the establishment of mutual trust. Since 2009 the CITY College further cemented its
future collaboration and relationship with the University by becoming its sixth Faculty with the other
five located at Sheffield. This means that CITY College is academically merged to the University and
its academic organisational structure, but it keeps its own independent financial autonomy and
governance.
The college comprises of three academic departments, namely Business Administration &
Economics, Computer Science and Psychology as well as a Humanities & Social Sciences Division,
including an English Language Support Unit. There are also two centres: the Executive Education
Centre responsible of the delivery of the Executive MBA programme and the South-East European
Research Centre - SEERC (SEERC, 2012). SEERC is an associated Research Centre and apart from
conducting funded research it also offers a Doctorate programme. Currently, the academic
departments offer six different undergraduate and ten postgraduate programmes, all leading to a
University of Sheffield degree. Among these programmes, there exist ones that are delivered only in
the Thessaloniki campus while others are also offered in other cities of the South-East European
region (Sofia, Belgrade, Kyiv, Tirana, Bucharest and Istanbul) in collaboration with academic
institutions in these remote sites. This internationalisation was a strategic plan of the College in order
to widen and expand the portfolio of programme and academic influence in neighbouring states of
South-East Europe (Kefalas & Ketikidis, 2012). The academic staff of CITY College consists of 70
members, most of them full-time staff, few flexible contract adjunct staff and a number of visiting
professors from British Universities. Another 40 people form the administration and support staff.
Concerning the college’s students, approximately 65% in Thessaloniki whereas the remaining 35%
study in other locations in which programmes are delivered. Out of the total number of 900 students,
40% are undergraduates whereas 60% are postgraduate students.
The College has been audited numerous times as a collaborative provision by the UK Quality
Assurance Agency (QAA, 2012) and awarded a number of accreditations from the British Computer
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