RMIT VIETNAM SAIGON CAMPUS

Assessment Task 3: Individual Reflection

Course BUSM4294 – Driving Innovation in Organization

Student name Nguyen Pham My Tin

Student ID S3802817

Lecturer Nguyen Tran Phi Yen

Word count 1589

I. Introduction
Happy Flower is a chain of floral stores which specialize in creative bouquet designs and
edible flowers to deliver the most memorable presents for customers. They aim to become the
number one service in sharing and delivering loves through flowers and unique gifts. After
understanding the owner’s vision to expand and strengthening their existences to nearby markets
through the development of their new segment, Happy Flower Academy (Academy for short), it
is reasonable to introduce more potential customers to acknowledge about this movement.
Therefore, our team’s mission is to spreading Academy reputation through the usage of online
channels in order to promote entrepreneurial spirits inside potential students, so that they are
encouraged to participate in Academy.
Majority of team’s members whose expertise are in digital marketing, which is valuable
assets to the project as their knowledge and experiences directly contribute to the success of this
project. Besides, with other’s specialties in strategic planning and media can supports the teams
in testing process to generate the best results. This reflection aims to provide clear overview of
personal lessons gained through this project, considerations about teamworking and how my
works contributes to the personal experience. Furthermore, application of tools and theories
learnt from the course will be discussed to explain how they have helped the team to achieve the
wanted outcomes and my own development. Finally, adjustments that should be made will be
discussed to clarify how they could improve the future projects.

II. What have I learnt?

A. Overall project
The effectiveness of practice-oriented learning towards students have been proven to
improve many entrepreneurial traits (attitude, mindset, self-evaluation, planning, financial
literacy, resources arrangement…) along with increasing entrepreneurial intentions (Colombelli,
Panelli & Serraino 2022). Project-based learning also encourage students with engage in tasks
actively and seeking innovative solutions that utilize more resources effectively along with
allows students to set their own learning time, goals and methods that most suitable for them
(Almulla 2020). In order to maintain success of projects, it is suggested that team retrospective
should be conducted internally so that more documentation can be performed so that problems
and resolving methods can be applied in the future (Hayes et al. 2011). Therefore, star model of
agile retrospective is implemented to analyze and determine the performance of the team.
 The key lessons from the project that the team agreed on including lack of understanding
for the requirements of the projects, basic concepts of innovation and appropriate directions,
which leads to the misdirection of the project. Because of this, the team had focused too much on
the business problems, mostly follow the requests from the owner, spending efforts on irrelevant
goals and leading toward unwanted results. Furthermore, since the team used the owner requests
as the starting point, the whole supposed project procedures are broken. We decided to skip
phases so that the project can be executed quicker. After reflecting on team retrospective, I have
learnt that every time starting on the project, it is necessary to carefully consider the
requirements, determine what are the relevant and practical goals to achieve and carefully
research before making any decisions. While these are some basic steps, but in reality, it is very
easy to neglect and forget these necessary stages, resulted in miscommunication, irrelevant
statements and failure of the project. After this project, aside from setting deadlines and task
allocation, I think it is necessary to plan for the project stages of necessary phases and objectives
for each stage so that team member is on the right track and identified any irrelevant activities.
B. Role Contribution
It is proven that project teamwork is one of effective tool contributed towards project
success (Iqbal et al. 2017). Team collaboration is vital for the project performance as efficient
working process amongst team members allows the completion of project in time, saving budget
and improve outcome quality (Shatti 2018). Therefore, teamwork is essential for students to
develop which supports for their employability and career growth as study suggests that students
equipped with relevant skills have higher academic performance (Prada, Mareque & Pino-Juste
2022). My responsibility in the team is investigating Happy Flower’s internal business structure,
their products and customers to understand and established business model canvas (BMC) and
value proposition canvas (VPC).
My roles contribute foundation knowledge for the team through the use of
abovementioned tools so that other team member can base on and provide appropriate and
relevant HMW statement and solutions for the business. Since BMC and VPC are clear
frameworks that describe an overall business into smaller segments, provide insights of customer
profile and how business products can help the customer, which act as an “shared language” that
many people can understands and contribute their efforts to forms a big picture for decision
makers to identify weaknesses and offer the best solutions (Osterwalder & Pigneur 2010;
Osterwalder et al. 2014). After working with these tools, I can actually realize the importance
and how much easier to create and testing a business idea with these frameworks. Since the
business is transparently described with these tools, brainstorming for ideas are more efficient,
other team members can base on my works to decide the best approach for each person section,
which reduce miscommunication and irrelevant ideas.

C. Theories and tools

 Business model canvas & Value proposition canvas

As briefly introduced above, BMC is a standard framework which covers nine building
blocks of a business. It is also similar with VPC as this framework allow planners to understand
the patterns of value creation, leverage the product and avoid wasting time with ideas that are
infeasible (Osterwalder et al. 2014). BMC is a useful tool to describe a business, in order to
support planners to comprehend business operation and weaknesses and generate new ideas for
the business (Muwafak, Mokadem & Abdeldayem 2021). VPC also help our team understand
Happy Flower’s product, how it satisfies customer expectation, to consider if whether the
product focus on customer needs or the marketing messages is appropriate or not (Varga 2020).
Therefore, with the use of BMC and VPC, our team able to have overall understandings of the
Happy Flower, immediately noticing the innovative requirements for the business, propose the
promotion of new segment through online platforms to meets the owner’s vision. This canvas
provides concrete foundation for the project to stay on the right direction, to unite the members’
opinions and logically decide which steps the team should make next. Therefore, the HMW
statement can be successfully established, and the hypotheses can be accurately determined.
  Test cards and learning card for testing hypothesis

It is suggested that business experiments should have clear purposes, simple and practical
enough so that people conducted in the experiments could agree upon so that the most accurate
results can be extracted (Thomke & Manzi 2014). Furthermore, it is advised that business
experiments should focus on individuals and each person response, so that the most specific and
accurate behavior and perceptions of customers are noticed (Anderson & Simester 2011).
However, this means reports should be catered for each responder with clarified objectives,
methods and requirements that are clear to testers. Test cards and learning cards are made for
each respondent, with clear hypothesis, metrics and criteria for each team member know what
they are looking for and simple designs so that team member can determine which behavior is
most relevant to come up with next decisions. These are a good form of experiment management
that helps our project to reduce risks or miscommunication, standardize the testing procedures,
extracting most important results and removing insignificant or unsuitable responses so that the
accuracy is ensured.

III. What can I improve?

 Backup plans for hypothesis experiments

While all the hypotheses tested generated decent results for the recommendations, some
changes are needed during the process which caused the timeline to be delayed and fixed. This
experience showed me that it is vital to always have back-up plans for testing methods. As
suggested, it is better to run multiple experiments for one hypothesis to genuinely validate the
accuracy of results (Bland 2020). Besides, having multiple experiments for one hypothesis can
act as backup plans if the main testing method failed or cannot be implemented, which is exactly
what we faced during the project. During the testing process, we come up with many testing
methods that require lots of Facebook tools and agreements from the Happy Flower staff.
However, we soon discover that using these tools are very expensive and the budget for these
tools will be paid by the owner, which may cause burden and conflicts with the client. In the
future projects, I learned that for each hypothesis testing method, we should have another backup
method in case that less relied on other parties.

 Performing each experiment separately

Bland & Osterwalder (2020) recommended that all experiments should not be done
parallel, and one experiment should only be finished before conducting the next one, especially
in small groups. Due to restriction in time and number of hypotheses need to be tested, our team
are forced to separate teams and perform multiple tests. Consequently, the results generated
could have been better. In the future, it is important to conduct experiment earlier with more
members and longer timeline so that all members can contribute their talents and efforts in one
hypothesis only.
IV. Conclusion
Project-based learning is very beneficial for students as it helps them to be more
confident and improve many entrepreneurial skills for their future career. This project has helped
me to sharping my skillset along with enrich me with new knowledges. New insights for
teamworking and theories and tools are useful for later project management skills and career
development in the future. However, some minor alterations including planning backup methods,
having experiments less relied on external involvements and conducting each experiment
separately could improve future projects and how I should apply these knowledges to sharpen
my entrepreneurial pathway that I chose.

V. References
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to Engage Students in Learning’, SAGE open, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 1-15, accessed 22 August 2022,
Research Gate database.

Anderson, TE & Simester, D 2011, ‘A Step-by-Step Guide to Smart Business Experiments’,

Harvard Business Review, accessed 22 August 2022. https://hbr.org/2011/03/a-step-by-step-
guide-to-smart-business-experiments

Bland, JD & Osterwalder, A 2020, Testing business ideas, John Wiley & Sons, New Jersey.

Bland, JD 2020, ‘How to Select the Next Best Test from the Experiment Library’, Strategyzer,
accessed 22 August 2022. https://www.strategyzer.com/blog/how-to-select-the-next-best-test-
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Colombelli, A, Panelli, A & Serraino, F 2022, ‘A Learning-by-Doing Approach to

Entrepreneurship Education: Evidence from a Short Intensive Online International Program’,
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Hayes, D, Grossman, F, Knapp, C & Rising, L 2011, ‘The impact of project retrospectives on
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Muwafak, BM, Mokadem, W & Abdeldayem, MM 2021, ‘Business Model Canvas (BMC) as a
tool of Planning and Implementing: Entrepreneurial Projects: A Case Study of GOOGLE
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Prada, DE, Mareque, M & Pino-Juste, M 2022, ‘Teamwork skills in higher education: is
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