Marketing Innovation Course at Maastricht University SBE
Learn to deploy real AI agents — on your own VPS, connected to Telegram, running 24/7.
Master-level course at Maastricht University School of Business and Economics. Using Problem-Based Learning, you'll develop hands-on skills in innovation management while building your own AI agent.
Understand innovation: drivers, dimensions, and pitfalls. Learn how strategic marketing performs innovation activities and detects market trends.
Capture external ideas from customers, competitors, and policy makers. Coordinate with R&D, operations, HR, and information systems.
Apply state-of-the-art tools: Design Thinking, Growth Hacker Marketing, ideation, prototyping, and scenario development techniques.
Learn how innovations are adopted and diffused in markets. Understand how marketing influences the innovation lifecycle.
From zero to a running AI agent in under 10 minutes. No DevOps experience required.
Go to hostinger.com and choose a VPS plan. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS is recommended. Note your server IP and root password.
Open your terminal and connect to your server:
Run the one-liner installer — it sets up everything automatically:
OpenClaw walks you through connecting your AI provider (e.g. OpenRouter) and choosing your model:
Create a bot via @BotFather on Telegram, copy the bot token, then run:
Paste your token when prompted. OpenClaw connects your bot instantly.
Your AI agent is running 24/7 on your own VPS. Open Telegram, message your bot, and start building. Welcome to Marketing Innovation.
A live demo of Agentic AI for marketing. Describe any product — watch an AI agent autonomously research the market, define audiences, craft positioning, create multi-channel content, and critique its own work. Only your imagination is the limit.
Interactive web app — runs in your browser. No installation needed. Try it with your own product idea or use a built-in example.
Step-by-step instructions, discussion questions, and bonus challenges for the classroom. Ready to print or share.
Not just chat. An AI agent plans and executes multiple steps autonomously — research, analysis, creation, and self-critique. This demo shows all 5 steps in real-time.
💡 How to use in class: Open the demo on a projector, run a live campaign with a student's product idea, then have students try individually or in pairs. Use the exercise guide for discussion questions and bonus challenges. Works with any OpenAI-compatible API or in demo mode without a key.
Once OpenClaw is installed on your VPS, connect it to Telegram in three simple steps. Your students get a personal AI assistant they can message directly.
Open Telegram, search for @BotFather, and send /newbot. Give it a name and username. BotFather returns your API token.
Back in your VPS terminal, run the onboarding command. Paste your bot token when prompted:
Open Telegram, find your bot by username, and send your first message. Your AI agent responds instantly — running 24/7 on your VPS.
GLM-5.2 is a powerful model with a 1M token context window — perfect for long conversations, research, and student projects. Here's how to activate it.
Go to openrouter.ai and sign up. OpenRouter is an API aggregator — one key gives you access to hundreds of models including GLM-5.2, Claude, GPT-4, and more.
Add a few dollars of credits (GLM-5.2 is very affordable). Then go to Keys and create a new API key.
During openclaw setup, select OpenRouter as your provider and paste your API key. Or edit the config directly:
By default, OpenClaw uses openrouter/auto (auto-routing). To pin GLM-5.2 as your model, send this command in Telegram:
Alternatively, set it in the config file directly:
Or pick from the interactive menu:
GLM-5.2 by Zhipu AI is an excellent choice for this course:
Hold entire course conversations without losing context.
A few dollars covers weeks of student usage via OpenRouter.
Excellent reasoning, coding, and creative tasks — great for innovation projects.
Strong support for English, German, Chinese, and many more languages.
Three links. That's all it takes to go from idea to running AI agent.
Affordable, fast VPS hosting. Get your server online in minutes. Ubuntu 22.04 recommended for OpenClaw.
The AI agent platform that powers your bot. Install it on your VPS, connect Telegram, and you're live.
Full documentation — installation, configuration, channels, agents, skills, and advanced setup guides.