A key challenge for lecturers of many first year Management courses is how to help students create meaningful knowledge connections while at the same time introducing considerable foundational material. This article reports on an instructional innovation that explores how we can better design and teach a first year Management course that provide strategies which assist students to engage with course ideas and recognize relationships between concepts. In addition to deliberate and systematic alignment of design, teaching and learning strategies, and assessment tasks, we use concept mapping to support learners in the construction of their own meaning of course material; to connect, and integrate key concepts. Our approach demonstrates that when students are provided with the space and tools to support the development of meaningful knowledge connections, their learning can improve.