8360-608 Assignment Example

Innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship at Level 6 is not about having ideas — it is about creating the conditions in which ideas emerge, survive organisational resistance, and produce measurable value. Unit 8360-608 examines how senior leaders foster innovation culture, apply creative problem-solving systematically, and deploy entrepreneurial thinking to identify and exploit opportunities within established organisations.

This assignment example follows a commercial director in a 200-person UK training and development company that launched a new digital learning platform — transitioning from purely face-to-face delivery to a blended model during 2024-2025.

Learning Outcome 1 — Understand Innovation Strategy and Creative Problem-Solving

AC 1.1 — Evaluate the Organisation’s Approach to Innovation

The training company’s historical approach to innovation was reactive and opportunistic — new programmes were developed when a client requested them or when a competitor launched something visible. There was no systematic innovation process, no dedicated innovation budget, and no mechanism for capturing ideas from employees or clients. Tidd and Bessant (2024) classify this as ‘ad hoc innovation’ — innovation that occurs despite the organisation rather than because of it. The consequence was inconsistency: some years produced genuinely innovative programmes (a VR-based leadership simulation in 2022 won an industry award), while others produced nothing new. The digital learning platform initiative represented a deliberate shift toward strategic innovation — identifying a market opportunity (corporate demand for scalable, asynchronous learning accelerated post-pandemic), allocating resources (£185,000 development investment), and building an innovation process that could be repeated for future initiatives.

AC 1.2 — Apply Creative Problem-Solving to an Organisational Challenge

The central challenge was not building the platform — technology partners could deliver that — but designing learning experiences that retained the human connection and emotional engagement of face-to-face training in a digital format. This was a ‘wicked problem’ (Rittel and Webber, as discussed by Buchanan and Badham, 2023): no single correct solution, multiple stakeholders with different definitions of success, and the risk that optimising for one dimension (scalability) would degrade another (learning quality). Three creative problem-solving techniques were applied. Analogical thinking: rather than benchmarking against other training companies (who faced the same unsolved problem), I studied how other industries had solved the ‘human connection at scale’ challenge — specifically, how telehealth providers maintained therapeutic relationships through screens and how gaming companies created community among dispersed players. Both industries offered design principles (structured interaction points, asynchronous peer connection, facilitator ‘check-in’ moments) that translated to the learning platform design. Rapid prototyping: rather than designing the complete platform before testing, we built a minimum viable product (MVP) covering one leadership programme, tested it with 40 learners over six weeks, collected detailed feedback, and iterated the design three times before scaling. The third prototype was fundamentally different from the first — the MVP approach revealed assumptions about learner behaviour that no amount of planning could have predicted (De Bono, 2022). Co-creation with clients: three client organisations were invited to participate in the design process — attending design workshops, reviewing prototypes, and contributing their learners to the pilot. This ensured the platform solved real client problems rather than problems the company imagined clients had.