MBA 4001 SU Slavery and Freedom The American Paradox Project

Introduction: In the dynamic business world, creativity and innovation are twin pillars, elevating ventures and driving competitive advantage. As MBA candidates at the culmination of your academic journey, the capstone project invites you to integrate knowledge from every corner of your studies, channeling it into a creative and innovative proposal for contemporary business challenges. This week, we will look at aligning your experiences with the symbolic framework of a hero’s journey. This should encourage you to harness the transformative power of creativity in the business realm.

Objective: To formulate a visionary business solution emphasizing creativity and innovation, drawing from coursework, personal experiences, and the Hero’s Journey narrative. This project aims to understand better how creativity can be systematically integrated into business models and leadership styles.

1. Setting Out on the Quest: Identify a pressing business challenge or opportunity in today’s global marketplace. Set the stage for your hero’s journey, explaining why this challenge resonates with you and what initial ideas or insights you bring.
2. Creative Sparks in Business History: Delve into a historical analysis of a company or leader that epitomized creativity and innovation in your area of research for the capstone. What lessons or inspirations can be drawn from their journey to inform your own?
3. Tools and Techniques: Explore methodologies and frameworks that foster creativity and innovation in business that could be useful to integrate into your project. How can these tools be adapted to your identified challenge or opportunity?
4. Bridging the Gap with MBA Learnings: Integrate principles, strategies, and insights from your MBA coursework. Identify at least three key concepts or models that can be innovatively applied to your business solution from other classes you have taken.
5. The Hero’s Innovative Solution: Outline your creative and innovative proposal for the identified business challenge. This should be a detailed blueprint, incorporating elements of strategy, marketing, finance, operations, and more, all filtered through a lens of creativity. This will help you finish up your project and allow you to tweak and alter elements from here on out. Again-when things are a first/second/third draft do not worry about perfection. When we are in week 10, you can bring all this together for the final version.
6. Challenges and Triumphs: Envision potential challenges your innovative solution might face in real-world applications. How would you, as the hero of this narrative, navigate and overcome these hurdles? Conversely, highlight the potential triumphs and the positive ripple effects your solution/project could create.
7. Feedback and Iteration: Engage peers or mentors to review your proposal. Incorporate their feedback, explaining why specific suggestions were adopted, and others were disregarded. How did this iterative process refine and enhance your creative solution? This will help you bring in your knowledge from work. Conversations with colleagues, mentors, and others in the work environment often help to crystallize emerging ideas. Maybe even reach out to someone you admire in your filed. Take a risk. Or two. 

Conclusion: Reflect upon your innovative odyssey, distilling key learnings, insights, and personal growth experienced throughout this capstone project. Project forward, envisioning how you will carry forward this spirit of creativity and innovation as you embark on your post-MBA journey in the business world.