Unitec Institute of Technology

Entrepreneurship

Masters/postgraduate elective at Unitec Institute of Technology

APMG 8118 Enterprise Creativity, Design and Innovation

Unitec offers a new elective course from late February 2012 providing students with enhanced capability to examine innovation, creativity, design theory and practice within several themes.

These themes include: leadership; structured processes for new product development; industry, national, and cultural factors; knowledge and ideas management; environmental responsibility and green design; financing; and intellectual property rights management.

To achieve the course aims, participating students will:

• Identify and evaluate the factors associated with successful and failed innovation.
• Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of structured processes for developing new products.
• Critique the impact of industry, national, cultural and global issues on the context for an organization's innovation strategy.
• Design an effective strategy for introducing an innovation into a specific organisational context.
• Implement and evaluate a pilot intervention of an innovation introduced to a specific organisation.
• Evaluate contemporary consultancy, facilitation and team work skills in the context of leading an innovation intervention.

An experiential learning approach is used in which students engage in designing and delivering a practical innovation realised as a new process, service, or product.

Assessment is based on a significant project in which each student:

• Visits a client organisation to identify opportunities for an innovation intervention
• Selects and presents an innovation intervention as a proposal to the client organisation
• Designs and facilitates the implementation of an innovation intervention accepted for pursuit by the client organisation
• Evaluates the lessons from their experience for their future professional leadership practice.