INNO1100 Legal Innovation and Creative Thinking: Recognising Opportunities in the Legal Sector

This topic is designed to help students better harness their creative and innovative potential, and to engage with the transformation that contemporary legal practice is undergoing in response to innovation. Through this topic students will develop important life skills while learning to identify opportunities in the legal sector, develop solutions and pitch proposals through a series of innovation challenges. Students will learn and apply skills and principles from human centred design thinking and research. These entrepreneurial and innovation skills are intended to improve student employability and effectiveness.

This topic aims to provide students with the mindset, orientation, toolkit and opportunities to develop innovative practices, with reference to the context of the practice of the law. The topic aims to build on theory and practice that suggests people are intrinsically creative and curious but also acknowledges that society, organisations, educational system and many other factors frequently stifle our tendency to be different, to think outside the box, and challenge the status quo. Techniques which allow the generation of a greater number of, and more original, ideas will be covered - including how to continue to evolve those ideas. A key lesson to take away from the topic is that innovation takes many forms, not just product/service innovation which tends to be front of mind when considering entrepreneurial ventures. Organisational innovation including operations, design and business model innovation, as well as social innovation, can often be even more impactful/valuable.

1. Articulate the significance of innovation and entrepreneurial thinking and demonstrate understanding of and reflection on innovation mindsets and personal priorities, demonstrating understanding of theories on creativity and innovation and factors which impact on them
2. Identify a problem worth solving, then explore that problem and generate insight using human centered design research in order to define and frame innovation challenges
3. Identify entrepreneurial and innovative opportunities in the legal sector
4. Apply design thinking approaches and creative problem-solving techniques to generate, evaluate and improve legal innovation ideas
5. Champion and pitch innovative ideas in organisational and other settings and practice these skills