Task
Learning outcomes and assessment criteria specific to this assignment:
On completion of the assignment, students should be able to demonstrate their ability to:
1. Justify the significance of innovative thinking and idea generation to support responses to organisational challenges, threats and opportunities
2. Critically evaluate current approaches and thinking within organisations to generate an idea as an innovative response to a contemporary organisational issue.
3. Synthesise research to generate and critically evaluate options in order to formulate a response to a contemporary organisational issue.
4. Apply appropriate resources and techniques to prepare, structure and deliver an oral presentation.
Plagiarism
Please read the plagiarism guidelines on your module page.
Late Submissions
Please read the late submission regulations and penalties on your module page or on your Course page.
Assessment Overview
Rationale
The nature of today’s global business environment means that contemporary organisations are faced with a range of challenges and opportunities presented by increasing levels of uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity. In order to be successful organisations need to find ways to be innovative, work with and indeed proactively exploit these conditions.
Such environments require individuals, teams and organisations to become more enterprising, resourceful, innovative and creative, and demand more critical or ‘beyond the box’ thinking. The aim of this module is to develop your awareness, skills and experience in the practice of entrepreneurship and innovation. We do this by involving you directly in the processes involved in generating ideas and establishing new ventures, and helping you reflect on how this experience relates to theory on the subject.
The chosen assessment method is appropriate to assess all four of the Module learning outcomes. It supports a theory to practice approach to learning and is in line with key expectations of employers and professional bodies for the development of effective oral communication skills. The capacity to draw on appropriate techniques to prepare and deliver confident and engaging oral presentations is a key management skill and is particularly relevant as a medium to promote innovative thinking and ideas within organisations.
Assessment method- this will be in 4 parts
The ‘Deep Dive’ is a practical activity that all students take part in in order to exercise their design thinking and critically review their ideas. This means that the assessment will involve you in generating ideas and creating a final innovative solution to help solve a contemporary problem. Therefore, it is concerned as much with the ‘result’ as the process behind. The process of design thinking takes place across 6 iterative stages, which will allow you to in a wide range of tasks and activities involved in launching a new innovative idea.
The ‘Deep Dive’ officially begins in week 2 when your workshop leader will ask you to identify a contemporary issue which you want to solve for the organisation given to you by the module leader. You must agree with your workshop leader. Once agreed upon, you will then need to carry out some field and desk research to fulfil the 2nd stage of the design thinking process.
You will then have a workshop to ‘ideate’ your ideas and this session will involve some groupthink and team work. There will be some ‘rules’ set here, in order to maximise the potential of your ideas. Following this, mock-ups of your proposed solution to the issue will be presented informally in the workshop and this will be an excellent opportunity to get some feedback from your peers and workshop leader in order to choose the most appropriate solution and/or tweak. ‘Fail often to succeed sooner’ is the motto here. Then there is an opportunity to test your solution and gain some feedback from others at BCU and outside (friends, family, general public). The final stage of implementation will be up to you and whether you wish to take your solution out into the World.
To pass this module, you must achieve a final overall mark of at least 40%. Failure to achieve a pass after the second attempt will result in the student being withdrawn from the course. The presentation assessment criteria are set out in the following pages.
Required
The presentation should be in a multi-media format based on an individual basis. You can use other visual aids as well, such as mocked-up product/packaging, 3D printing, modelling, photos post-it notes and so on. The presentation should be professional, engaging, academically rigorous and demonstrate the effective use of presentation techniques. The presentation is an opportunity for you to provide detail regarding the innovative solution you have come up with to the contemporary problem. Your 15 minute individual presentation should include information on (but not limited to);
Detail on the Design Thinking process – each stage to identify-
- the issue you are going to solve,
- the research you carried out,
- the innovative ideas you came up with and which one you chose to take forward and why
- the prototype
- the testing stage and feedback
- what do you intend, if anything, to do with your idea in the future
Your references page will not be included in the word count, but inline citations used in the main body of the assignment (e.g. Smith and Jones (2010) identified that…) will be included in the word count.
You are required to declare the number of words used in your assignment. If you produce less than or exceed the stipulated word count by more than 10%, a deduction of the mark awarded will be made to reflect that you have not met the assessment requirements.
