| Category |
Assignment |
Subject |
Management |
| University |
Northumbria University |
Module Title |
SM9715 Innovation and Entrepreneurship |
Assignment Brief
- Your assessment work consists of
(i) a case study on a digital business and
(ii) write a reflective statement on your learning experience, team presentation (please see below), the feedback you received and how you made use of this feedback.
- The case study and reflective statement are both INDIVIDUAL pieces of work, and together, they represent 100% of the module mark.
- Assessment criteria for both components are (i) informativeness, (ii) engagement with relevant literature, (iii) analysis and (iv) structure and writing. For clarity, in the reflective statement component, relevant literature corresponds to the literature on professional skills (e.g. project management, leadership), and analysis refers to using analytical skills to make sense of your own learning experiences.
- You are expected to keep evidence of your engagement with the sources you used in your assessment (for your case study and reflective statement), including screenshots or digital records of your search through academic search engines, your literature notes and drafts of both assessment components. You are responsible for keeping this content safe and clearly organised. You will add some of this evidence as an appendix to your submission (see below), and you may be asked to show all this evidence to your lecturers following your submission.
Component One: Case Study
The case study is a research-based, student-led assignment. You are expected to collect reliable and relevant information about the digital business that you are studying, review the relevant literature and analyse the information you collected in the light of your literature review to produce an informative and coherent case study.
Selection of Case Study Organisation:
You can choose the organisation for your case study following three rules:
- Your case study should be about a digital business organisation that was founded after 01 January 2009 (hence, not more than 15 years old).
- The digital business organisation you choose should operate in the industry you are assigned for teamwork in Week 1 (e.g. Fintech). You will be asked to work in teams and analyse a digital business sector. You will produce a collaborative literature review and analyse the business environment at the national or global level. You will present your collaborative work during the seminar in Week 6 and receive a formative mark (that does not affect the final module mark) and constructive feedback from your lecturer and peers in Week 7. The digital business that you will study individually will be from the same sector you studied as a team.
- We would like to encourage you to think about your case study organisation early on and we would like to see a good variety of organisations being studied. For these reasons, we
will ask you to indicate your chosen organisation by posting a short post on the module eLP (Blackboard).
You can change the organisation you are studying until the submission deadline following the same three rules.
Case Study Content:
As mentioned above, there is a link between collaborative work, for which you will receive a formative mark and feedback, and individual work, for which you will receive a summative mark and feedback. This link is designed to enrich your learning experience and make sure that you will benefit from teamwork and experiential learning as well as individual and self-directed study. However, you should not submit industry-level teamwork output as your individual assessment. Instead, you are expected to conduct further research and initiate a dialogue between the industry and the business, as well as examine the relationships between the business environment and business plan, the academic literature, and the case study.
Section 1: Critical analysis of the entrepreneurial narrative
- In this section, you develop a part of your case study that presents an overview of the company and a critical analysis of its emerging entrepreneurial narrative. This section is mandatory.
- A narrative is a description of connected events similar to history or a story. Furthermore, narratives often cover, or provide insights on relevant contexts and actors, as well as significant changes in these elements. Narratives have an important role in how we make sense of complex phenomena. Simply put, an entrepreneurial narrative is a brief story about an entrepreneur or an entrepreneurial organisation. It can include how an organisation was founded and grew, its major milestones and/or its distinctive features
- While presenting your critical analysis of the entrepreneurial narrative of the digital business you are studying, clearly distinguish between the way(s) the business, its founders and managers introduce, define and position the business, how other sources (e.g. in media, academic literature) describe this business and how you see this business based on the data and information you collected. Structure your section in a clear way to make these distinctions clear to the readers. If relevant, include comparisons and contrasts between these different aspects of the entrepreneurial narrative, or discuss the changes over time to enrich your critical analysis.
- You can choose any two out of the following four options to build Section 2 and Section 3. However, you need to make sure that the sections you write are coherent with each other and together, they produce key insights about innovation and entrepreneurship in digital businesses that you explain and justify in Section 4: Key Insights (see below).
Option 1: Review of relevant literature
- In this option, you are expected to write a literature review that helps readers appreciate your case study, as well as why it is interesting and worth studying. The literature review can provide a theoretical perspective for analysing and making sense of the case. It can also inform readers on the nature of the industry, including major strategic considerations, opportunities and challenges and/or societal considerations.
- A literature review involves careful engagement with academic literature (e.g. academic books and journal articles). You are expected to read academic publications, take notes, analyse and organise your notes and produce a coherent, well-organised text that informs readers about the studies you have reviewed.
- Your literature review section would build upon and further develop the collaborative analyses you conducted in your team. For clarity, do not copy and paste your collaborative literature review. Instead, conduct further research to create a dialogue between the industry-level analysis you have done collectively and the organisation-level analysis that you carry out individually.
Option 2: Focused analysis of the macro environment
- In this option, the section you write is an analysis of the macro business environment with a specific focus on the impact on the digital business you are studying. Like option 2, this section builds upon and further develops the collaborative analyses you conducted in your team. Macro environment typically refers to global or national business environment.
- Please provide an overview of your findings in your teamwork about the business environment in the sector that you studied. This may have similarities (in terms of data, facts and sources) with your team presentation, but the text should be your own individual work summarising the findings that you find important. Then, discuss the impact of the business environment on the digital business that you are studying. Provide further sources and evidence to justify your arguments.
Option 3: Focused analysis of the microenvironment
- In this option, the section you write is an analysis of the micro business environment with a specific focus on the impact on the digital business you are studying. Like options 1 and 2, a section written following option 3 would build upon and further develop the collaborative analyses you conducted in your team. Microenvironment typically refers to industry-level or sectoral business environment.
- Please provide an overview of your findings in your teamwork about the business environment in the sector that you studied. This may have similarities (in terms of data, facts and sources) with your team presentation, but the text should be your own individual work summarising the findings that you find important. Then, discuss the impact of the business environment on the digital business that you are studying. Provide further sources and evidence to justify your arguments.
Option 4: Description and critical assessment of the business model
- In this option, the section you will develop will present a description and assessment of the business model of the digital business you are studying. Your description of the organisation’s business plan should clearly identify the value proposition of the company, and explain how it creates/plans to create this value for its customers. You can use Strategic Management tools such as Business Model Canvas to structure or support your discussion. Your critical assessment of the business plan can also include the societal impact of the business and/or its impact on the natural environment.
- Your assessment of the company’s business model should analyse and critically evaluate the strengths and limitations of the company’s business. This analysis should be informed by and ideally would build links to the literature review and business environment analysis you collaboratively produced in your teamwork and the sections you wrote individually.
