an assessment of the project’s likely impact upon the firm’s overall success over the next 5 to 10 years.

You have been appointed the CIO (Chief Innovation Officer) of a major enterprise. This will be a large enterprise you know or can be chosen from existing global firms where adequate detail of internal operations is available. If you cannot find sufficient information about the firm you choose to study, you may make reasonable assumptions about the firm’s operations, including its new product development (NPD) processes.  You have been given the task of ramping up the firm’s innovative capacity through the development of an innovation plan for a major new project under development within the firm. This is a difficult task because few firms understand the comprehensive theory behind innovation. Hence, innovation plans are a new thing for most companies.

This innovation plan needs to be written up as a report to top management. You are to use theory where appropriate to support your analysis and arguments and to justify your conclusions.

This assignment focuses upon the theories, models and concepts about innovation development and commercialisation presented in Mazzarol (2011) Chapters 9 and 10, plus Appendix C. You may introduce any other theories and concepts you feel may be relevant to your plan.

Use the Innovation Diagnostic Diamond (Mazzarol, 2011: 378-380 and Appendix C), designed to benchmark the current capacity of the company or project team to move forward with development and commercialisation of the major new project. The outcomes of this diagnostic need to be discussed in this section and the actual diagnostic tool must be added as an appendix.