The most helpful and unique portion of the innovation process has been the evaluation process. The official pitch day in particular was especially helpful. This is because it allowed my group and I to pitch a polished product and get feedback/criticism without receiving a final grade. I found this process to be especially unique to this class. In other courses I have taken at William & Mary the final pitch on Friday would have been the end product and there would have been no more work done on the project. Because of this my group and I would not have been able to adapt our idea to feedback and continue to evolve the product.
The evaluation process was also helpful for me because it made me focus on trying to receive useful feedback concerning my project rather than attempting to sell it. This is a hard concept to grasp because I inherently became attached to my project since I put so much work into it. It is inevitable that this will happen with anything that I put work into, so it is important that I develop this skill and am able to get feedback without letting my personal attachment to a project cloud the feedback I get about it. I found this to be particularly challenging when I was pitching my project to professors at the official pitch day on Friday. This is because I wanted them to like my proposed project and knew that they could be very critical. I found myself working to sell them on my idea rather than engaging them in useful discussion concerning my project and receiving useful feedback that I could use to improve my concept.
Overall the evaluation process had a major impact on my project. When our group read through all of the feedback forms, looked for patterns in them, voted on which ones seemed most prudent, and compiled them into a google document it was very clear what issues we needed to address in our project. Because of the feedback we received, we were able to shift our proposal in a major way with the addition of a completely new aspect that addressed many of the concerns about our original proposal.