Criteria for Deciding on which Innovation to Fund: Week 3, Activity 4

I can understand that the Kaye & Hawkridge criteria helped them to select the case studies for a book on innovative elearning examples. However, in the innovation life cycle, the end product may be a way off yet. Johnson (2010) explains that the process of innovating is a continuous process of working in the "adjacent possible" - ideas that occur to you that are stimulated by the way things are now. Later he says "we take the ideas we've inherited or that we've stumbled across and we jigger them together into some new shape" (p 30) I would therefore be most concerned to make sure that potentially significant innovations that are not developed enough yet were not rejected too early.

The three criteria I am going to nominate are from the perspective of a project manager (like myself) in a private sector training company which is looking to make elearning a channel through which to develop new routes to market. At the moment this is relatively unchartered territory,

Cost will always be an issue and if the project is too expensive, it will not be afforded. Other criteria might help us work out which cost we should do well to find ways to afford. After all if the top line revenue generated by the programme can be increased, the cost becomes less of an issue.

The three criteria I would therefore nominate are:

1. New routes to market: is the programme appealing to and accessible by a wide audience of clients that would be new to our business? This might be judged by the number of students attracted so far, and the extent to which they are a new type of customer for the business.

2. Engagement of students: Our business prides itself on the impact that its f2f training interventions has on the performance of students back in the workplace. The degree of participation and excitement which it is possible to generate on and offline should therefore be a second criterion for deciding on the most worthy programme. Online participation monitoring and feedback from the workplace about any changes in behaviour/performance of students are at least two ways in which this criterion could be measured.

3. Customer Service: being able to monitor students progress, and then to personalise the programme to meet their learning needs and the needs that their business has of them will be an important way to differentiate our service in the market place. Programmes and technology that enable us to connect intimately with the learning progress of our students will therefore, again, be a differentiator in the market for the innovative programme. Activity in a VLE, and student responsiveness to new input could be methods of measuring against this criterion.



Madeleine


Reference:
Johnson, S (2010), Where Good Ideas Come From - A Natural History of Innovation, Allen Lane, London