Subject description

Business Innovation is a 20-credit subject at Stage 2.

In Stage 2 Business Innovation students are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and understandings to engage in designing, sustaining, and transforming business in the modern world. In a time when design-driven companies consistently outperform other stock market companies, Business Innovation foregrounds design thinking and assumption-based business planning tools to promote an iterative, human-centred approach to innovation and the transformation of business products, services, and processes.

Students ‘learn through doing’ in Business Innovation, using design thinking and assumption-based planning processes to anticipate, find, and solve problems. They learn in an environment in which risk is encouraged, where ideas are built up rather than broken down, and fear of failure is replaced with the opportunity to iterate as initial assumptions about problems, customers, or solutions are refined. Integral to this is the opportunity for students to work collaboratively in uncertain environments to identify problems or customer needs, generate and explore ideas and solutions, and make decisions based on incomplete information.

In Business Innovation students engage with complex, dynamic, real-world problems, to identify and design, test, iterate, and communicate viable business solutions. Through design thinking and direct involvement in innovation, students not only develop but also understand and apply their critical and creative thinking skills.

Students learn to innovate and think like designers to find and solve problems that matter to specific people in a business environment characterised by change and uncertainty.