Category: PG03

PG03 Project Brief

Business and Innovation

The MA/MSc Business and Innovation Unit starts from the question: what is needed to transform a creative idea into a successful enterprise based on enduring, meaningful and positive sets of social impacts?

Recognising that we now have unprecedented access to knowledge, technology, science, communications and new possibilities as never before, what does it take to develop an idea into an innovative, values-led and sustainable enterprise that can stimulate new ideas, be collaborative, agile and better positioned to succeed in the future? How can this be designed and prototyped? How can it be embedded? And how can it be translated into brand innovation and brand value as much as social innovation?

Unpacking the key components around open innovation, service design, and business modeling, the Unit will allow you to develop a framework for designing and launching an innovative enterprise. It will guide you through the key processes involved in transforming an idea and/or project into an innovative and values-led sustainable enterprise, both within organisations and outside of organisations.

This unit develops and examines skills in a number of practical aspects of design such as ideas generation, stakeholder engagement and business development. You will learn how to design and manage an idea from its early inception through to implementation as a key part of a design process.

The unit provides the opportunity to undertake a practical based project in which you can address a specific design issue using design centred methodologies and a practice-based research project.

The core of the course will allow you to form teams, co-design briefs and develop an idea/project to be launched to a wider market.

 

Design Principles

A key part of the assessment for this Unit will be an ability to engage with the design and innovation principles underpinning the idea of a sustainable creative enterprise. It will therefore be important to demonstrate ways in which your idea engages with the principles around innovation including some of the barriers you may encounter in introducing these principles, how they can support your business idea and where they might act as a hindrance. These principles are:

  • A Core Intent – the potential to develop a ‘core intent’ and value proposition to your idea so that it can stimulate commercial and brand value through interaction, social value, collaboration and ideas generation
  • A Holistic Approach – the need to approach your idea from a ‘holistic’ point of view, drawing on its potential impact in terms of people, technology, the environment, psychological and emotional meaning and long-term sustainability
  • Participatory & Inclusive – the importance of developing your idea ‘with’ key stakeholders, customers/markets etc. and not ‘for’ people and markets.These principles will be explored and discussed throughout the Unit and you will be expected to approach your project with a clear understanding of, and ability to, critique these principles. It is expected that you will be able to demonstrate the viability (or otherwise) of applying these principles to the development of your project.

    In engaging with these design principles, some of the questions you need to consider are:

  • How can the idea of ‘open innovation’ frame your idea?
  • How can this lead to new services, brand value and create social value?
  • How can you create networks to sustain and manage relationships, collaborations and repeated interactions rather than transaction in its most narrow sense?
  • How can you align and make sense of the many different elements of an idea for a service/business or brand – need/demand, expertise, technology, partnerships, people, money, brand, marketing, failure and success?

  • What are the mindsets and behaviours needed to succeed?

ASSIGNMENTS
1. Collaborative Work with MDes students

You will be expected to form teams of no more than five people from different subject specialisms in order to collaborate design and test an idea for early stage business. As part of this you will be asked to complete one of the three options below:

a) A diagnostic exercise of you own individual idea or

b) A diagnostic exercise of your group idea or

c) An empathy mapping exercise of the entrepreneurial needs and aspirations of Ravensbourne undergraduate students using the Rough Diamond model as a framework

The deadline for submission is: TUESDAY 24th APRIL

2. Group Presentation

In your groups you are expected to prepare a 10-minute professional presentation on how you will create a business idea as a concept to be presented to potential stakeholders, including investors, and to possible customers. Part of the assessment will be your ability to deliver the presentation within the time limit.

The presentations will be measured against:

  • The power, elegance, and value of your idea
  • How extensively and thoughtfully you have analysed the market, the opportunity and the problems
  • How desirable, feasible and viable your concept and plans are

The way that you have succeeded in turning this idea into a brand (ie: what will it look like? What will it feel like? How will it speak to your customer/stakeholder base? Each presentation can be no longer than 10 minutes and should be prepared to high professional standards. All media can be used.

Date for Presentations: TUESDAY 29TH MAY

3. Summative Assignment
Early Stage Idea for a Disruptive Creative Enterprise (Supported by Current Research and Literature)

You are required to prepare and submit a research-based Reflective Individual Report on an early stage Business idea and the process of developing this idea. This should be uploaded onto Moodle no later than 5.00pm on Monday 11th June.

Central to this assignment will be your understanding of ‘Innovation’ as an approach to enable you to gain a better understanding of a business challenge and developing a viable approach around the resolution of a problem or set of problems.

The Report needs to provide detail around:

  • An area (a market) in which there is potential for a creative enterprise solution
  • A process of enquiry, research, and conversation with key stakeholders/end users
  • An articulation of a vision and strategy for an early stage business based on the evidence you have gathered

To achieve this you will need to:

  • Demonstrate a business/societal need
  • Design a core value proposition to meet this need
  • Design a brand around your value proposition based on stakeholder/customer interaction and social value
  • Do initial identification around ways of engaging people/customers/stakeholders with your brand
  • Demonstrate where the enterprise will have to look 5 years into the future and where very radical innovation is likely to be necessary.

Your Report needs to illustrate ways that have engaged with current literature and research as well as how you are engaging with a new set of ideas that have been identified using reflection to ‘enable you to uncover knowledge in and on action’. (Schoen 1983).

Date for Summative Assignment: MONDAY 11TH JUNE (5.00pm)

Harvard Referencing system should be used as appropriate throughout all submitted elements of this unit.