FOSTERING A CULTURE OF CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION

Note: This is a three-part Assignment that is submitted over the course of 3 weeks. This week, you will submit Part 1. You will submit Part 2 in Week 5 and you will submit Part 3 in Week 6. Additionally, you will use the same document for each submission (renaming it each time you submit). In this week’s submission, you will complete Part 1, and you will leave the placeholder language for Parts 2 and 3 as is.

Important Note: This Assignment features one of the Business Skills for Good that you will learn more about and develop throughout your MBA program. This skill, growth mindset, involves the idea that knowledge, skills, and abilities can be developed through effort.

For this Assignment, you will take on the role of an applicant who is seeking a position as a team leader who must engage in and inspire creativity and innovation within the team. The company’s leadership team was impressed with your résumé, especially your previous experience with analyzing and incorporating creativity and innovation into an organization from your role as a consultant. During your first phone interview, the vice president in charge of product improvement, Robert Simmons, emphasized the following needs:

We are looking for a leader who can foster creativity and innovative thought processes in a dedicated team. The position requires a creative mindset and the ability to convey, assess, and implement creativity and innovative ideas and processes. Not only that, the team this person will inherit has a blend of personalities and is suffering from low morale. This leader must be able to create an improved team environment that will bring about positive change for our organization.
Based on the strength of your initial conversation, Robert has invited you back for a follow-up interview with the entire leadership team and has asked you to make a presentation to the team on your leadership approach to creativity and innovation. In addition to sharing your knowledge and perspectives on creativity and innovation, he has asked that you show how you plan to incorporate leadership strategies to enable creativity and innovation and to foster a positive and productive environment within your team that will lead to improved organizational outcomes.

You will develop a PowerPoint presentation that includes detailed speaker notes (or a script) for each slide that you would use if you were delivering the presentation to the company’s leadership team. Also, be sure to incorporate references to appropriate academic sources, such as those found in the Learning Resources, or those in the Walden Library.

BY DAY 7
Submit Part 1 of your presentation (with accompanying speaker notes). Be sure you are fully addressing the following in 4–5 slides, excluding references:

Part 1: Incorporating the Creative Process

Analyze the importance of the creative process in establishing business practices.
As part of your analysis, explain ways in which creativity can manifest through business practices.
Using your own creative process as the basis for your design, propose a strategy of what the creative process could look like for a team in an organization, being sure to include specific stages in the creative process.
Analyze the impact of a growth mindset on creativity and innovation.
As part of your analysis, explain how you could incorporate a growth mindset into your creative processes or your creative processes within an organization.
Refer to the Week 4 Assignment Rubric for specific grading elements and criteria. Your Instructor will use this grading rubric to assess your work.