CREATIVITY AND INNOVATION - 2025/6

Module Overview

Strategic marketing requires the ability to understand and respond to new trends and innovations and you will be able to choose the focus of your group project in the areas of sustainability and ethics should you wish. This highly collaborative and practical module will enable you to reflectively learn from your own lived team-based experience. You will work closely together in groups with other diverse students to discover and apply a range of creativity and innovation tools, concepts, and mindsets. This will help develop your resourcefulness and resilience and global and cultural intelligence. You will learn how to harness the creative capacity of heterogenous teams using design thinking concepts to foster a human-centred, empathetic culture that thinks out-of-the-box and fails fast via experimentation. You will develop the news skills and knowledge required to glean, synthesise, and assess consumer insights, and use them to frame problems and attempt to solve them creatively. If you choose a digitally focused project, you will be able to further develop your digital skills. At the end of the module you will be able to confidently apply newly learnt tools and approaches to solve 'wicked problems' ethically, a skill set that employers value highly.

Module provider

Surrey Business School

Module Leader

O'BRIEN Justin (SBS)

Number of Credits: 15

ECTS Credits: 7.5

Framework: FHEQ Level 7

Module cap (Maximum number of students): N/A

Module Availability

Semester 2

Prerequisites / Co-requisites

N/A

Module content

• Developing a diverse, creative team


• Framing strategic marketing problems


• Introducing the five stages of design thinking: empathise, define, ideate, prototype and experiment/test


• Supporting the growth of a creative culture


• Operationalising consumer insight collection, synthesis, and assessment


• Ideation and creativity to strategically design non-incremental solutions to marketing problems


• Iterative solution finding, implementation, and evaluation


• Reflective, ethical evaluation of the design thinking methodology


• Importance of developing and sustaining a creative culture for strategic marketing

Assessment pattern

Alternative Assessment

Individual coursework

Assessment Strategy

The assessment strategy is designed to provide students with the opportunity to demonstrate: Each workshop will provide you with the knowledge and experience for you to then directly apply to your summative group assessment project as you progress through the semester. You will be encouraged to complete the group assessment step-by-step (demonstrating weekly progress) using extended twice-weekly beyond class meet ups.  The final workshop of the semester will be used to demonstrate your learning, via group presentations to the class. The individual assessment will allow you to create an impactful video reflection on your learning journey.

Thus, the summative assessment for this module consists of:

• (as stated above already) Group Project Presentation [ LOs 1-5]. 70%


• Reflective Individual Video [ LOs 3-5] 30%

Formative assessment

You will be given ample time and space to explore and discuss ideas in small groups, but also then contribute insights and learnings to the wider group in plenary. This will give you the opportunity to also develop your presentation skills and confidence for public speaking. You are encouraged to collate your key learnings in a weekly diary and to discuss these with peers and the module leader during the course of the semester before, during or after class. This could take the form of an in-person communication (ideal to benefit from reflections) or email-based conversation. Feedback You will benefit from regular supportive and profound developmental feedback from the module leader and your peers throughout the workshop series. Plenary feedback will be provided to each group for the summative finale of the module orally. For the individual assessment, you will receive a grade, numerical evaluation on the marking rubric and summary written comments. In addition, the cohort will receive a summary overview of performance as a SurreyLearn post on formal completion of the marking.

Module aims

• Help develop diverse teams and harness creative capacity
• Learn through experience to be able to apply the principles of design thinking
• Research, analyse, frame real world problems, and create practical solutions

Learning outcomes

Methods of Teaching / Learning

You will learn by doing in immersive, creative and collaborative workshops. You will be expected to prepare for classes by undertaking required theoretical readings, videos, and case studies (known as a flipped classroom) from content provided to you in SurreyLearn, such that class time can be spent focused on applying and discussing new learnings. This form of experiential learning expects and requires high levels of student engagement and a more reflective, guide like teaching style. It resembles the way you will be expected to learn and perform in many workplace scenarios, and your assessments will also be authentic, related to real world strategic marketing outputs.

Indicated Lecture Hours (which may also include seminars, tutorials, workshops and other contact time) are approximate and may include in-class tests where one or more of these are an assessment on the module. In-class tests are scheduled/organised separately to taught content and will be published on to student personal timetables, where they apply to taken modules, as soon as they are finalised by central administration. This will usually be after the initial publication of the teaching timetable for the relevant semester.

Reading list

https://readinglists.surrey.ac.uk
Upon accessing the reading list, please search for the module using the module code: MANM551

Other information

Global and cultural intelligence This module by encouraging profound and effective diverse team working will by default see students develop their global and cultural intelligence.

Sustainability :You may choose to focus your group project on a sustainable project. Ethics will be core content.

Resourcefulness and resilience: Using the flipped classroom, and an expectation to undertake substantial beyond class group-based follow-on work you will be encouraged to take on a 'wicked problem', for an unknown topic and using unfamiliar approaches to resolving them. The iterative philosophy of experimenting and 'fail fast' mantra that underpins Design Thinking will help foster both resourcefulness and resilience.

Digital Capabilities: Although this low digital module focusses on human-centred interactions, you may elect to pick a digital topic and drive your digital experience further.

Employability The wide range of skills and experiences offered in this reflective, experiential module, the Design Thinking concept and extensive group working will develop your core employability skills. You will be able to apply the group assessment to any area, ideally this will help build your employment credentials.

Please note that the information detailed within this record is accurate at the time of publishing and may be subject to change. This record contains information for the most up to date version of the programme / module for the 2025/6 academic year.