Business Case Studies & Business Publications

Innovation Impact Assessment

Liedtka, Jeanne M.

Exercise

Innovation Impact Assessment

Liedtka, Jeanne M.

S-0406 | Published May 11, 2023 | 1 pages Exercise

Collection: Darden School of Business

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Imagine the impact on your students’ motivation and learning if they could personally assess themselves—and receive peer feedback—on the critical behaviors that would make them better innovators. As faculty, we know that innovation capabilities are fundamental life skills, regardless of the disciplinary interests and career choices our students make. Based on over a decade of research at UVA’s Darden Business School, we know that facilitating students’ developmental progress on five core competencies—opportunity seeking, relationship skills, reflection, scientific reasoning, and presencing—equips them to dramatically improve their ability to work collaboratively to create solutions, products, or experiences that can change the world. The culmination of our research has been the creation of a set of self- and peer-assessment instruments intended to serve as the foundation of effective learning experiences in innovation-related courses (such as Design Thinking, New Product Development, Agile Software, and Lean Start-Up). Widely published author and educator Jeanne Liedtka and her coauthors, Karen Hold and Jessica Eldridge, have worked with thousands of practicing managers, students, and nonprofessional designers to identify a simple observable set of 44 behaviors that characterize successful innovators. Rigorous factor analysis has grouped these into five bundles of capabilities: opportunity seeking, relationship management, reflection, scientific reasoning, and visualization. The Innovation Impact Assessment offers both self- and peer-driven measurement related to each of these competencies to help learners identify what is limiting their innovation success and provide them with practical guidance (in the form of detailed personalized feedback reports) to accelerate skill development.