Programme Structure

Unit 1: Exploration and Experimentation

Unit One acts as an induction into the College and an immersion into the area of design-driven innovation and its management.

It introduces you to critical thinking and discourses within the subject debate, utilising an interdisciplinary and collaborative team-based approach to learning as a first step to productive collaboration.

The unit supports you in establishing the necessary contextual knowledge and research skills needed to explore the subject and locate yourselves within it, whilst establishing what is, or might be possible in terms of design-driven innovation. The unit offers the opportunity to experiment, take informed risks, engage with uncertainty and learn from failure.

It opens with an Orientation Project enabling you to understand each other's backgrounds and areas of expertise, as well as to engage with London as a research resource. The Collaborative Projects that follow give you the chance to work in groups to given briefs, testing various methodologies and methods and exploring the possibilities offered by the subject, in the development, management and communication of relevant strategic innovation opportunities.

Unit 2: Collaboration and Independence

This unit acts as a natural extension to Unit 1 and requires you to identify, propose and investigate a personal direction, in which you can demonstrate originality and self-direction in tackling and solving problems that are genuinely at the forefront of the subject.

Unit 2 lasts for 40 weeks, from term 3 in Year One until the end of the course, and builds in additional formative assessment points and opportunities for reflection.

There are three main elements to this unit: scoping and identification of a personal innovation management area to investigate; research, analysis, critique and examination of this area written in a coherent way; organisation of, and communication at, an innovation management conference/forum.

The first element gives you the opportunity to investigate the discourses of design, innovation, innovation management and business in order to locate your position within them. As this finishes you will be able to identify an area for investigation, in an individual project.

This second element gives you an extended opportunity to undertake a sustained research project. As part of the field work for this project there is a 15-week work placement, within an external host partner, or partners, to be identified, organised and managed by you. Critical reflection upon this, and other academic work that you do in parallel with this placement, enables you not only to develop your own strategic innovation opportunity, but also your own ideas about how such an opportunity can be managed; you write a dissertation articulating the findings of this research project as a whole.

Finally, you will contribute to the planning and promotion of, as well as participation in, an innovation management conference/forum. You will need to manage the relationships between the needs of each individual and those of the year group as a whole.

Ultimately, the unit is about identifying opportunities as part of a critically reflective practice, and forging and managing strategic relationships with external partners as the basis of collaborations to implement, test, communicate and manage innovation

Audience

We are actively seeking open-minded graduates from diverse academic and industry backgrounds who want to innovate, ideally with relevant work experience from business, marketing, engineering, sciences, social sciences, humanities and design. A key characteristic of our candidates will be the desire to extend their subject-specialisms by colliding with, negotiating between and connecting with people, concepts, discourses and practices that are outside their normal activities, and who are keen to locate the creative outputs of these engagements in the area of innovation.