BUS368 ECA (End-of-Course Assessment) SUSS : July Semester 2024 – Innovation Management and Digital Transformation

Section A

Question 1

Case Scenario

SharpEyes Pte Ltd is a local producer of video camera devices used in home, office and shop premises. It is a family-owned business and has developed strong core competencies for their products. Profit had been good a decade ago. But margins had been dwindling in recent years due to intense competition.

A year ago, the company decided to pivot towards higher-end cameras. It wanted to develop very high resolution cameras with embedded Artificial Intelligence (AI) chips that could also detect and recognise objects and people. Additionally, it should also be able to detect and discriminate between movements such as walking, running, falling, smashing, driving, swinging, etc. So, the company invested heavily in strategic exploratory R&D to develop such a product. The plan was to sell this device to car manufacturers who would integrate this into their ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance System) systems that use motion recognition and high-resolution images to enable semi-automated self-driving functions.

To reduce production cost, the R&D effort sought to use ordinary-grade lens to produce high-resolution images through back-filling of artificially-generated pixels based on AI-prediction. Unfortunately, the R&D produced mixed results. The images were fuzzy, even worse than what an ordinary optical lens could produce. But the AI was still able to recognise objects and movements with blurry images. It was a big blow. Bodily and facial features could not be made out from the image, only broad outlines. Such a device would certainly not be suitable for ADAS nor self-driving functions.

Matthew Chan, the CEO, looked grim at the last strategic R&D review meeting. He uttered: “I am very disappointed. Our R&D endeavour to develop our next-generation product has failed miserably. We have already spent some $1.5 million on the project. I am not prepared to commit more funds to continue development. I want to salvage whatever we can from this costly failure!”.

Dillon Chan, the millennial scion of the CEO, who would soon succeed the latter, added: “Perhaps, we can put our heads together and creatively figure out how we can put what we have already developed to better use. Although we are not prepared to fund the original exploratory research further, we can still make use of the remaining $500,000 budget to fund applications engineering. I want to establish our company as a socially-responsible and impactful organisation. Although our ADAS dream is now shattered, I am sure we can still innovate on something that can leverage on our latest R&D project.”

Within the next couple of days, SharpEyes rolled out an in-house Innovation Contest for all its employees to suggest their next innovative product. The winner would have a chance to be appointed as a Product Manager and to lead the applications engineering effort to develop the suggested innovation.

(Source: An original case passage written by the Assessment Writer)

In this assignment, you will be required to use independent thinking and analytical judgement to apply innovation effectively to real-world problems.

Imagine that you are an employee of SharpEyes and you have been waiting for an opportunity to propel your career ahead. What innovative ideas can you put forth? How will you develop the discussions, justifications and presentations to win the Innovation Contest?

Question 1a

Analyse the case scenario and suggest a tangible product innovation that will help to salvage SharpEye’s unexpected R&D “failure”. Explain your proposed product idea. Describe its physical features and functions along with a clearly labelled diagram of your idea. Recommend one practical method of protecting your innovation.

Question 1b

Innovative products can be used in many different ways. Define social innovation. Describe a particular real-life social issue or problem in Singapore that is under-served and can potentially benefit from your suggested innovation of Q1a. Apply your proposed innovation of Q1a to better serve this need. Support your answer with relevant citations and URL links.

Question 2

Question 2a

Digitalisation is often confused with Computerisation. Differentiate the key difference between these two concepts. Illustrate three (3) different ways that digitalisation can be applied to your product innovation and its social use-case of Q1b.

Question 2b

Appraise two (2) different ways in which the classical NPD (New Product Development) process is different from the Design Thinking process. Demonstrate how you would apply “empathy” in the development of your proposed idea for social innovation of Q1(b).

Section B

Question 3

SharpEyes Pte Ltd would like to apply to the Ministry of Social and Family Development (MSF) for a social innovation development grant to help finance the development of the innovation of Q1(b). Imagine that your proposal has won the SharpEyes Innovation Contest and your CEO has requested you to make a presentation to the senior officials at MSF. The MSF would like to know the details of your innovation. In particular, they are very interested to find out how your innovation can improve Singapore society.

Prepare a video presentation of at least 3 minutes but not exceeding 6 minutes. It should present a summary of your answers to Question 1 and Question 2 found in Section A.

There are two methods for ECA video assignment submission: either Record Media or Upload Media. For Upload Media, please note that your file size should be no more than 500MB and the format must be .mp4

SECTION C

Question 4

Prepare a set of PowerPoint presentation slides upon which the video presentation is based.

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