Description
Topics:
You are part of a team of students providing (free of charge) consultancy for a client. You have a choice between three clients:
the local council (a large, bureaucratic, risk adverse and resource constrained organisation) that is experimenting with open innovation approaches in order to come up with innovative solutions to respond to the increasing demand for new services in context of diminishing funding.
a 5-year-old and fast-growing technology company that is interested in maintaining and nurturing its culture for innovation while its structure & strategy are changing dramatically
a small technology consultancy company that focuses on delivering technology solutions to the service sector – its clients range from retailer and tourism companies, health and the third sector, to education and government.
The team leader has assigned you the enviable task to (1) choose the client and (2) review existing (academic) evidence to inform the team analysis. In discussion with the three potential clients, the team leader has clarified the requirements for this literature review:
Client 2: innovation culture in growing organisations
The client has tripled in size over the past year, and while the growth justifies its strategy and is well accommodated within the changes made to the structure of the company, the founders are concerned that it might be difficult to accommodate the strong innovation culture that characterised the company as a small new venture within a growing organisation, where there are less personal connections among employees. They are interested in understanding how to make innovative cultures sustainable in large organisation and as part of this, they have asked specifically for a collection of successful case studies of maintaining innovative cultures in large organisations. The team’s first task is thus to review existing research to identify case studies of successful innovative cultures, which ideally (but not necessarily) also trace the history of the company from its early stages to growth. Your task is to conduct the literature review to identify successful examples and to focus not only on how these cultures look like, but mostly on understanding the challenges that growing organisation face in maintaining such cultures as their strategies & structure change.
Tip: There is a vast literature on organisational culture and on organisational (cultural) change. You need to focus your literature search on culture in relation to innovation only. A good essay would address the entire problem – i.e. growing pains - not only the (relatively simple) question of what a culture of innovation looks like.
As this a literature review essay, base your analysis only on available evidence, i.e. research findings (do not speculate!). This means focusing on academic research (e.g. peer reviewed journal articles, academic conferences). You may include grey literature (e.g. white papers, consultancy report) if relevant and discuss this separately to complement your main literature analysis.
Generic guidelines for writing essays are available here
Here you have 3 essay examples from previous years to use as guidelines for HOW you could write a literature review essay NOT for WHAT to write! Please note that the assignment questions were different (although referring to similar topics) - and had no contextual information in the past (hence the more generic approach to conducting the literature review).
example 1
example 2
example 3
Assessment Criteria
Presentation
Well presented & structured, with clear writing style
Introduction
The topic & assignment is clearly introduced
Contents and discussion
Clear interpretation of the assignment
Clear explanation of the background to the project (including data sources)
Depth of analysis of the project
Depth of understanding and use of relevant theory
Coherent and supported line of argument
ConclusionSupporting material
Clear and well supported conclusions
Source & use of reference material