89171 Innovation and Entrepreneurship: B
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Subject handbook information prior to 2023 is available in the Archives.
Credit points: 6 cp
Subject level:
Postgraduate
Result type: Grade and marksDescription
This subject explores the potential of design thinking as a generator of innovative and entrepreneurial strategies, practices and designed things through interdisciplinary innovation challenges, and developing entrepreneurial outcomes of varying scale and context.
Students are required to radically cross-boundaries of their known discipline to contribute to diverse projects through the application of corporate and academic research and development methods. Students inherently cooperate within complex systems, responding to client requirements and considering the effect of their choices on the project outcomes throughout the process.
In addition to Design, expertise within this subject Is drawn from a variety of disciplinary fields such as Business, IT Engineering and Architecture.
Through this subject students gain advanced skills in the management of interdisciplinary entrepreneurial projects, as well as exposure to client contacts in the wider community for a session specific project.
Subject learning objectives (SLOs)
On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:
| 1. | Apply a design thinking methodology to tackle complex problems that span the domains of technology, business and human factors. |
|---|---|
| 2. | Engage in collaboration with students from other disciplines and mentors from both university and industry. |
| 3. | Engage in emerging research methods and synthesise research findings with a proposed innovation. |
| 4. | Empathise with users/clients in a specific domain, and from this, develop a point of view towards a chosen problem. |
| 5. | Develop and test a series of prototypes and demonstrate a bias towards action. |
| 6. | Actively reflect on the processes and methodologies being used, and be able to identify learning needs and seek answers independently. |
| 7. | Prepare a preliminary business plan and develop appropriate materials to pitch an idea to a potential investor. |
Teaching and learning strategies
EXTERNAL PARTNERSHIPS
The subject works with external Partner organisations who are corporate, government and not-for-profit groups. The Partners are invited to bring forward their innovation challenges for students to tackle. Teaching staff assist to develop the strategic aim and brief of each challenge with Partners and students. Partners are invited to brief the project teams and frequently interact with the students throughout semester. Using experience ethnography, design thinking, and ongoing prototyping, students develop ideas for how to revolutionise the interactions between people, space and technology to achieve more innovative solutions for the Partner’s context. Unlike many other academic projects, which require students to optimise one variable, students design a complete system while being mindful of not only the primary function but also the usability, desirability, and societal implications. Throughout one semester, student teams prototype and test many of their design concepts and in the end create a full proof-of-concept system that is presented back to Partners at the end of semester ‘LaunchPad’ pitching event.
U.LAB ECOSYSTEM
Students, academic staff, and industry coaches from across Sydney come together to form the U.lab community. U.lab graduates from previous years contribute support as part of the Catalysts network. Catalysts regularly mentor current student teams and facilitate industry interactions. U.lab hosts a number of innovation events in Sydney that consistently draw together a tight network of U.lab collaborators from startups, corporate and government sectors, enabling interaction and mentoring of student teams.
BOOK PUBLISHING
U.lab publishes books as part of each semester that are an excellent record of the processes, thinking and prototyping that occurs in developing the projects. Students' projects are published in the current semester's book.
Content (topics)
This subject addresses the following issues and topics:
- Entrepreneurship
- Service Design
- UX (user-experience)
- Strategic Design
- Participatory Design and Interaction Design
- Sustainability
- Social innovation
- Social media
Recommended texts
? Schweitzer, J., & Jakovich, J., (2012): Crowd Share-Innovation: Intensive, Creative Collaborations, Freerange Press, Sydney, ISBN:978-0-9808689-3-7.
? Jakovich, J., Schweitzer, J., Edwards, M. (2012): Practicing, Freerange Press, Sydney, ISBN: 978-0-9808689-2-0
? Brookes, W., Edwards, M., Jakovich, J., Jupp, J., Kirchner, N., Nikolova, N., Schweitzer, J. (2011): U.lab – it’s about you, DAB Documents Faculty of Design, Architecture & Building University of Technology, Sydney, ISBN: 978-0-9808622-3-2
? Osterwalder, A and Pigneur, Y, (2010): Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers, John Wiley and Sons, 288p.