Mapping innovation roles project

Learning Outcome: This project will build your understanding of innovation roles and help you recognize how people actually serve in these roles in organizations to carry out an innovation.

Guidance: Your analysis will portray and describe the key roles played in the innovation process in a selected business. Students will select an innovative business from the list of Fast Company or Inc. 5000 companies for this assignment. You are encouraged to select novel companies that have been rated as top innovators on annual lists of FastCompany, Inc. Magazine, or other sites. For instance, see http://www.fastcompany.com/most-innovative-companiesor  https://www.inc.com/inc5000/2019/top-private-companies-2019-inc5000.html

For your selected business or organization (and an identifiable innovation in that business), explain how each innovation role can or would play a part in its ultimate success.

Advice: A suggested format for this project would look something like this:

• Brief introduction of the company/organization, including its basic mission and some of the types of innovations it produces. (no more than one page)


• Innovation role descriptions as they are (or could be) mapped to this particular organization. The roles should be portrayed and mapped to who in the organization might play that particular role, the nature of the role, and the organizational context for each role. Draw upon the video lectures in the module on innovation roles and the resource materials posted in that module's discussions as a basic description of those roles. (no more than 4 pages)


• Reference sources to support the role descriptions you provide. It is expected that you will search the web sites of their selected organization to find basic descriptive and mission materials. It’s likely that these organizations will have descriptions about their innovation strategies on their web sites as well. Further searching of the internet, the UMCP library database, Google Scholar, and various news sites will yield useful information to describe these innovation roles (as needed).

Deliverable: At least 8 innovation roles are expected to be identified and analyzed. The scope of your analysis is expected to be about 5 single-spaced pages, including references.

Posted below are examples and the rubric