Business Project: Managing creativity and innovation for business success

CONTENT:

Today creativity and innovation are seen as the main factors for business success, not only for startups but also for established firms. However, even the most successful firms struggle with the question of how to direct employee creativity towards results that are useful for the organization, how to use external sources of creativity, how to decide which ideas are supported with firm resources (budget and staff) and how new ideas are best implemented in product development.

In this business project we will analyze how large established firms manage their creativity and innovation processes by using a range of management control techniques, such as innovation process specifications, performance measurement, budgeting and incentives. Students will conduct a number of interviews with top and middle managers of large firms, design a questionnaire to collect field data and they will statistically analyze this data. Insights from this field research will be compared to insights from the scientific literature and recent concepts forwarded by consultants such as the Design Thinking Approach. The project will be an ideal starting point for a Master or Bachelor Thesis in this field (possibly, in cooperation with one of the partner firms analyzed in this project).

LEARNING OPPORTUNITIES FOR STUDENTS:

- Students interested in creativity, innovation and management control will be part of a research project and learn how to do a practically relevant research study. Students will get unique real world insights into firm’s innovation and product development processes and they will have the chance to learn from the experiences of middle and top managers in large Austrian and International firms.

- Students will have the unique opportunity to develop and train their team-working and leadership skills. According to the „IfU Business Project Approach“ which has been awarded the Austrian State Price for teaching (Ars Docendi) 2016,  five Master Students will take the role of team leaders and lead small teams of Bachelor students. The experienced challenges of leadership will be discussed in class and all students (Bachelor and Master students) will have the opportunity to get invaluable „learning by doing“ leadership experience for their future career.

After completing this class students will be able to:

• conduct systematic literature reviews
• critically read and make sense of research articles
• structure complex business problems
• design and implement research projects

Apart from that, completing this course will contribute to students' abilities to:

• organize and manage a large-scale project in the field of strategic management and management control
• pursue the project management (PM) activities and master the use of various PM tools
• structure complex and ill-defined problems
• apply theoretical knowledge from different fields to find creative hands-on solutions to real-life business problems.

The final grade of the course will depend on:

• group presentations including peer evaluation: 35%
• project handbook and presentations: 35%
• customer satisfaction - evaluation by partner firm: 10%
• PMO-reporting: 10%
• participation: 10%

Arthur Posch & Lea Zwickl