Blog 6 - Thoughts on Creativity - Due 25-Oct

First, please note that I have moved the due date back to end-of-day on Friday, October 25th.  I hope that helps your week a bit.  Having move the deadline for the blog, I would still really appreciate you all completing the assigned articles for Wednesday.

There have been a number of assertions and many pages of research about creativity and there still seems to be a good bit of debate about what makes people and organizations more creative (and, then, assumedly, more innovative)

The response for this is a bit more open than the previous blog topics.  Overall, I want to hear your thoughts about creativity and innovation as an individual and within organizations.  Here are some questions you can consider, but you can address other issues related to this topic if you have other things to say on this.

1.  What are you personal experiences with individual creativity?  Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?

2.  What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity?  Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?

3.  Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself?  And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?  

4.  What do you think about the idea of different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?  Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

As always, please keep the blog guidelines in mind, which are posted in top right column of the page.

Blog 5 - Visualizing Iinsights - Due 21-Oct

For this next blog, I'd like you to get some experiences thinking about and even trying to build a visualization of data.  You may want to look at the slides I've posted on Blackboard for our session next Monday for inspiration and a wide range of visualization ideas.  Warning: the file sizes are really big (https://courses.utexas.edu, so be prepared when downloading.

The first step of this blog is to find a source of quantitative data.  You can choose a data source yourself or use one of my suggestions below from Mintel (I've posted the report summaries that you can use on Blackboard under Course Documents/Blog Stuff).  I've tried to find a few reports that seemed interesting to me.  The data source you use should be fairly simple for this first exercise, so do not choose one that is overly complicated (or choose just a piece of that data).
 
This one will not be graded based on word length, but, rather, the effort and creativity of your visualization approach.  What you produce does not need to be pretty - I'm not assuming you know how to use Adobe Illustrator or similar package, so you are welcome to draw it out very simply or do a basic representation in Powerpoint or something similar.  So, I'll be looking at how much data you attempt to represent and your effort to push yourself to visualize in a way that tells an interesting story.  Be bold and experimental with this - I promise to reward you for your audacity.

Report Topics from Mintel
Dollar & Discount Retailing Customers
Food Trucks
Fragrances
Marketing to Non-Traditional Parents
Red Meat
Retailer Loyalty Programs
Teen & Tween Beauty and Personal Care Consumer

Blog 4 - Business Model Analysis Report - Due 9-Oct

This blog is an opportunity for you to explore your report topic. This is not a final contract on your topic - you can certainly change your topic after you write this. The whole point of this blog is to explore the company enough so that you and I feel comfortable about your ability to create a full report out of it. Here is what I would like to see included:

- The company you would like to choose for the business model analysis.  Give me a brief description of the company, including the industry category, the products or services they sell, and their overall positioning in the marketplace.

- Why is this company interesting to you?  Remember: this is a big goal for the assignment!  I want to see that you have a strong interest, and maybe even passion, about this company. 

- Who are the 3 to 4 primary customer segments that are most important or that you are most interested in analyzing in this report?  I am worried that if it is less than 3, then you may have a difficult time covering them in this paper, but more than 4 and the paper will be too big.  If you only know of 2 and are still very interested, let's just discuss that one-on-one.

- Briefly, what do you think is the value proposition for each of those segments?  Is it the same across all of them or different and, if so, how?

- Please be sure to cite any sources that you use here.

Do not forget the minimum length guidelines. Also, try NOT to write in sentence fragments, although a list that includes complete sentences if fine.  As always, provide visuals where helpful.

We will be reading these posts so that we can provide feedback on what you have thus far and make sure you are heading in a good direction.

Have fun with it!