This was the week of Systematic Inventive Thinking for me. I finished reading Inside the Box and then got together with my group today to apply the innovation concepts to our project. We came up with some (possibly) viable options, but I’m not certain we are completely on the same page with our client. It was more challenging than I expected to meld the SIT concepts to the specific scenario with which we are presented in our project.
I think this situation underscores how important alignment and clarity are for the capstone project and for the field of marketing in general. You simply cannot produce what the client wants without this crucial understanding.
This confusion comes from some extent to the dual nature of our assignment. In addition to using SIT, our group has also been tasked with applying ideas from behavioral economics in our project, and we are still figuring out how these two tactics will work together. My hunch is that they can be leveraged to provide some sort of synergistic benefit, but I haven’t gotten far enough with either to know how that might play out.
As it stands now, I think we have some interesting SIT applications, but it’s possible that they are outside of the scope of our work. After our group session, I came away wondering just how flexible our client will be with the constraints they have laid out. We have a meeting with them tomorrow, so I am hoping we can work through some of the ambiguity. A part of me also wonders if this lingering ambiguity is simply part and parcel of the whole capstone, and larger marketing, experience (as we discussed in our first class).
It remains to be seen! I’m certainly up for honing my professional relationship skills in addition to applying SIT and behavioral economics throughout this semester. On to the next week.
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