Evaluating Organizational Innovation and Making recommendations on a real-world case
Objective: It is important that you have the opportunity to apply the skills and knowledge to a realworld organizational problem. For this reason choose an organisation or firm to which you have
access, or which you know well, and develop a plan for improving creativity and innovation within
the organization. It may help to consider yourself a “Creativity and Innovation Consultant.” You have
two main tasks, both of which will require a thorough analysis of the organization, the application of
information/frame works/models, and additional outside research specific to the problems your
organization faces.
Tasks:
• Analyse their strengths and weaknesses in their creative and innovative processes e.g. their
position in innovation metric, status quo, use questionnaires, innovation value chain
(diagnostic tool), incorporate culture (area of change, best practices) etc.
• Propose an action plan to improve their creativity and innovation
Suggested Do’s:
• Choose an organisation you know personally. Case study based assignments usually do not
work as well. Medium sized organisations are ideal.
• Please use some primary evidence in your assignment – interviews or surveys are ideal. You
may also use existing survey data or internal documents as primary evidence. Asses the
innovation strategy and provide the evidence of key stakeholders.
• Use the innovative toolkit and draw on other academic literature to support your
arguments.
Preferably Don’t:
• Do not choose a very small (micro) organisation – the scope for strategy development here
is usually too limited for an in-depth analysis.
• Do not focus on a single problem within the organization (that is the focus of the group
assessment, not this one) – this should focus on a variety of organizational factors that
influence innovation within the organization.
• Do not rely on anecdotes and unsupported statements – you should provide evidence for
your analysis and suggestions, either from your primary organizational evidence or from
the available research.
• Do not use tables as a way around the word limit – they should be used as a concise way to
illustrate the relationship between categories of information
Questions that may help you work on the paper:
• How would you characterise the current state of innovation and creativity in the
organisation? What are the key drivers or inhibitors of creativity and innovation? How is this
influencing business performance?
• How would you describe the ‘context’ in which the business is operating? How does this
influence the innovation strategy/action plan you might develop?
• What is the objective of your innovation or creativity strategy proposals? Who should be
involved?
• How are you going to measure and evaluate the success of your proposals? E.g Metrics, KPIs
etc
• What do you see as the key implementation issues in delivering on your
innovation/creativity strategy? How might you overcome these?
• Did you identify and clearly articulate the problem(s) you are addressing?
• Appropriate application of frameworks/models from the module
• Effective use of primary evidence (interview/survey/internal documents) where available.
• Argument is well supported by references to wider academic literature
• Reflexive attitude to developing the plan and recognition of the plan’s limitations
• The essay is presented effectively – it is well organized and well written
