Reflective Essay: Design Innovation Project - Strategic Opportunities

This reflective essay delves into strategic innovation opportunities identified during a design innovation project, focusing on value proposition analysis, stakeholder mapping, and the identification of strategic opportunities for co-creation and social innovation. The student reflects on the tools used, such as stakeholder maps, SWOT analysis, and co-creation frameworks, and how these tools aided in understanding the competitive landscape and fostering collaborative creativity. The essay also highlights the importance of teamwork, communication, and problem-solving skills acquired during the project, emphasizing the practical application of theoretical concepts in a real-world service design context. The project involved analyzing a case study of "The Club House," a London-based company providing business services, and identifying strategic opportunities for innovation and co-creation based on stakeholder needs and value propositions. The student concludes by emphasizing the value of learning by doing and the transferable skills gained for future professional development.

Running Head: INNOVATIVE DESIGN REFLECTION
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Reflection
Innovative Design Reflection
(Student details :)
3/16/2019

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Innovative Design Reflection
In this reflective paper, I will reflect upon strategic innovation opportunities recognized by
my team while working on the innovation design project. I will reflect over how important
tools utilised and helped my team while analysing the value proposition as well as
stakeholders mapped within the recent service design case. Besides, I will reflect upon how
such tools utilised helped our team, while identifying strategic opportunities for co-creation
and social innovation. With the help of this reflective writing, I will demonstrate the
importance of learning by doing and learning by practice (Heyrup & Bente, 2009). In this
way, self-reflection will be beneficial for my future career and professional development
(Heyrup & Bente, 2009).
After completing this module of designing innovation project I acquired skills for effectively
working in design innovative teams. I also gained experience of managing complex service
innovation procedures as well as working successfully in the field of design innovation.
While I was gaining knowledge and understanding during the module, I understood the
service design area, through focusing on social innovation (Belbin, 2012). In addition, my
team gained awareness about the key issues related to social impact and value co-creation.
My experience of the module made me understand the effects of team-building on effective
project management (Heyrup & Bente, 2009). My team and I together analysed current
service-design cases through identifying strategic opportunities for innovation. I would like to
mention that my experience of utilising digital communication tools was excellent in terms of
future career development (Osterwalde, 2014).
I also acquired many transferable skills during the module, for an example, our team used
service design as well as innovation management tools which will benefit my future
professional life in the relevant field. In addition, while I and my team were analysing the
value proposition as well as stakeholders mapped in the current service design cases then we
got engaged with problem-solving by applying creative thinking. It means that our project
designing through innovative ideas required problem-solving at many instances, hence my
team used analytical and creative thinking to resolve all of those issues. Additionally, I
observed that while working with the module team needed to develop the effective means for
implementing and communicating useful strategies (Rita et al., 2016).

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From the perspective of teamwork skills, I gained a life-long experience and learning after
working with the great team of mine. In this context, my team has successfully demonstrated
planning and organizing skills. We all team members understood that to be organized getting
tasks done within the deadlines is essential. Along with the problem-solving skills, I also
demonstrated effective and prompt decision-making skills while helping my team in taking
important team-decisions (Belbin, 2012). I also realised that effective and professional
communication is necessary to maintain harmony within a team, and hence I decided to
nurture my basic communication skills to be successful in near future. The process of
developing team-work skills allowed me to identify the role of persuasion as well as
influencing skills while managing harmony in my team. I and my team members learnt
conflict resolution at a large extent as we were working on design project through innovation.
In addition, our tutor taught us how to develop critical reflection skills along with the essay
writing guidelines (Colenso, 2012).
Source: (Osterwalde, 2014)
In addition, my team and I utilised important tools for analysing the value proposition and
stakeholders map within the current services design cases. I learnt a lot about stakeholder
map as that map let us knew about the people who are greatly influenced form social

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innovation process (Rita et al., 2016). Moreover, we also used 5-forces analysis tool to
understand the power of the competitors in a way that we could recognize our own status
within the market. Thus, we made a suitable strategy for the future improvements.
Additionally, my team and I utilised strategy canvas tool to see the comparison amid the
analyses firm as well as their competitors from different critical successful aspects. I realized
that strategic canvas is a simple yet powerful conception methodology (Osterwalde, 2014). I
learnt that a strategy canvas is typically a line plot which plots factors or functions against
significance for an organisation and after that connections industry or competitors
benchmarks. As per my views build based on innovative design project, a strategy
canvas assists while finding uncontested marketplaces. Thus, I found the purpose of a
strategy canvas as to assist while identifying blue ocean opportunities which an organization
can dominate. In addition, to analyse value proposition and stakeholders map, we used
SWOT tool being a significant tool which helped my team understanding our company’s
strengths as well as weaknesses for finding the opportunities and threats (Colenso, 2012).
Moreover, another tool to recognize strategic opportunities for social innovations and co-
creation was Co-creation framework. On the other hand, I realized what my team could learn
through utilising the co-creation framework. For an instance, by using co-creation framework
tool, I realized the collaborative creativity in a team. The framework enabled all of us team
members to innovate ideas rather than following simple procedures (Osterwalde, 2014).
While my team was utilising such tools to identify opportunities for social innovation then I
realized that it is a very good learning process. To use our innovative and creative thinking
for co-creation, my all team members intertwined the knowledge with processes within a
complete co-creation framework despite just enabling co-creativity (Osterwalde, 2014).
During our first team meeting, it was an interesting day because we all team members were
assigned in a team together by accident, yet we figured out numerous critical problems
together. We named our team as “Innoclub” as we assigned a Design Innovation Project and
hence we chose “The Club House” being our case study. The creative thinking behind this
name was that we combined the two names together; innovation and club. Thus, it clearly
depicted that my team was an innovative team as well as was actively seeing team works as
playing interesting games within the club. Each team members of my team contributed a case
study that was involved to service design cases in both work as well as mobility areas. My
team and I draw 5 horizontal axes, as per the criteria include data analysis, innovative,
interesting, product service system and social innovative impact in order to create stakeholder

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map (Osterwalde, 2014). My team chose “The Club House” being the targeted research
company through utilizing the analysis tool. The Clubhouse provided professional spaces
along with the rounded facility system on hand for attending customer’s need.
Furthermore, my team and I identified strategic opportunities for co-creation with the help of
co-creation matrix as well as co-creation framework. In addition, to fulfil the co-creation
needs, our team studied about many kinds of stakeholders from the clients’ perspective. In
this context, we all team members separated clients into 2 parts, agreeing to the club house
directed customers (Heyrup & Bente, 2009). While preparing stakeholders’ map, small,
medium companies as well as start-ups along with the Freelance employees have considered.
Later then, we engrossed the company’s structure again and hence finished the stakeholders’
map. Moreover, during minutes of meeting-3 our team discussed many issues upon the co-
creation framework forms. We as a team identified the stakeholders being crucial for the
clubhouse, because they have considerable impacts on the company’s overall development
(Heyrup & Bente, 2009). For an example, the social media platforms like company media or
website impact Company’s growth. I learnt that, clients acquire an improved sense of
inspiration through the design-led working environment (Colenso, 2012).
In whole, I experienced a great life-long learning while working with the team on this
innovative design project. I learnt about value proposition map consisting of product and
services, gain creators, customer profiles and many more. In addition, with the help of team-
19 we all mapped stakeholders over the graph successfully while considering CEO,
employees, clients, suppliers, designers, cooperative partners as well as shareholders.
Additionally, we team-19 successfully identified and worked on strategic innovation
opportunities based on the value proposition map, stakeholder map in the current service
design. Finally, my reflective writing successfully reflected upon the tools utilised for
identifying those strategic innovative opportunities for social innovation as well as co-
creation.

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References
Belbin, R.M., 2012. Team roles at work. London: Routledge.
Colenso, M., 2012. High performing teams in brief. London: Routledge.
Heyrup, S. & Bente, E.B., 2009. Reflection: Taking it beyond the individual. New York:
Routldge.
Osterwalde, A., 2014. Value proposition design. New Jersey: JohnWiley & Sons.
Rita, R., Neda, M. & Nasrin, S., 2016. Team-Based Learning: A New Approach Toward
Improving Education. Acta Medica Iranica, 54(10), pp.678-82.