Innovation Month (5 cr)

Evaluation scale

Approved/Rejected

Objective

Student:
- Understands the process product development based on customer information
- Can collect information about customer needs, customer criteria and competitors via interviews and surveys
- Can analyse customer and competitor data for market positioning and innovation potential
- Can use creativity technicues for product innovation and can critically compare and evaluate different business ideas.
- Can recognize uncertainties about a business idea and design business experiments to clear these uncertainties

Content

This course is highly intensive series of workshops during which students act as teams and apply different techiniques to understand their target customer needs and criteria. Lessons learned during the workshops are implemented between the workshops. New product concepts are developed based on gathered and analysed customer information. Further, a simple business experiment is design and implemented based on uncertainty analysis.Final presentations are given to a group of visiting experts.

Materials

http://www.theseus.fi/bitstream/handle/10024/33313/B29_verkkoversio.pdf;jsessionid=FD2E00BA3515F261C35F0BDAFAF8AA07?sequence=1

Teaching methods

The course consists of 8 workshops, each being 4 academic hours long. During the course, you will understand what is entrepreneurial thinking and will have the opportunity to develop clear business, product, or service ideas into a concept in co-operation with both students and experts. During workshops, you will have the possibility to not only acquire new skills but use these skills for producing innovative business/ product/service concepts.

Also, we will be able to identify the answers to such interesting questions as:

Time or money?
Is the Earth flat?
What is success?
What is critical thinking?
Should I change my life?
Where's My Million Euros!?

And many other questions and answers!

Completion alternatives

The objective of the course is to produce concrete business, product and service concepts with the help of diverse group members and experts. During the course, the group works through different phases of the product development and divisions of business plan. The group works with innovative methods using different practical assignments.

The course provides skills and capabilities to start innovative business and develop the business further along with fellow students and experts. This gives a possibility to crystallize students’ own business ideas or develop product and service ideas. After passing the course, the student understands the different sections of innovative business. Also, the student has the capability to learn and enforce new product development methods and use these skills for producing innovative business/service entities. The course provides possibilities to learn new skills related to the social media and later utilize these skills in the business. Possibilities for new network contacts increase during the course.
The student can exploit these capabilities, skills and contacts in the future either as an entrepreneur or as an employee (the mindset of an entrepreneur).

Student workload

1. Orientation meeting (4 h) and pre-assignment (15 h)
2. Intensive WorkShops (24 h)
3. Independent work (30 h)
4. Discussions via social media and Google Docs (18 h)
5. Learning Diary (39 h)
6. Final Meeting (4 h)
7. Feedback (1 h)

Assessment criteria, approved/failed

Pass/Fail

Further information

- Pre-assignment before the orientation meeting
- Other deadlines will be agreed at the beginning of the course