This project is designed to equip you with the skills needed to analyse and find solutions to common innovation challenges faced by organisations. It gives you the opportunity to combine learning from the module with your own creativity to challenge the status quo and develop a credible environment for innovation to thrive.

Imagine that you have been appointed as an external innovation management consultant to an organisation that you currently work in or, alternatively, an organisation you are intimately familiar with, perhaps through your previous employment or business dealings. Your task is to report to the CEO / MD with an innovation action plan that takes into account the financial and resource constraints that the organisation faces. The plan must be both engaging and implementable.
// THIS part is already done – use elements out of this work !!!
As you have already started the Module Project by analysing innovation in an organisation. This week, you will finalise the project with a deeper analysis of how innovation takes place and how it could be improved in your selected organisation.
// A load of background information are already prepared – but still analysis and charts have to be done.
Addressing the following:
• Describe the strengths and weaknesses in the organisation’s innovation management structure.
• Discuss how the organisation currently sources new ideas, technologies and so on for its innovation activity. Evaluate, critically, the effectiveness of the current approach and discuss how this can be improved.
• Discuss how the concepts of lead user innovation, open innovation and disruptive innovation may or may not be applicable to the organisation’s sourcing approach.
• Provide a diagrammatic illustration (and a narrative) of the organisation’s innovation strategy, even if the organisation does not have an explicitly defined strategy.
• Propose how an improved innovation strategy may be developed, making sure that all the building blocks of an innovation strategy, as discussed in the module notes, have been addressed.
• Propose how this new strategy may be implemented. Describe how the process of implementation will be managed, both from the processual and change management points of view.
• Discuss the potential challenges in implementing the proposed innovation strategy and how these could be overcome.
• Discuss how you would monitor the success of the new innovation strategy.