Write a brief report relevant to the areas identified in the scenario provided below.
Scenario
You are a small business advisor working for a consultancy specialising in innovation. A CEO of a small business startup approaches you for advice to help them decide whether their idea is viable as a business. They intend to create a new dating website for people between the ages of 30 and above.
While both the CEO and directors have experience of using dating websites, they want to ensure that they develop their dating site based on what is known about the online medium, and specifically want to understand what psychological aspects are relevant to an online dating context. Your role as an advisor here will be to help them understand their future customers better, and identify some things that might be useful areas for innovation.
The online dating market is a very crowded market for a new business, and so as a result the CEO wants to develop a company that is highly creative, with staff supported in developing innovative ways in which people can interact on dating websites. As the CEO is not a psychologist and has little experience in enhancing creativity in organisations, they want to be briefed on what factors would improve creativity, and what they might do to support creativity in their organisation. They are therefore asking you to provide specific information and advice on what factors would be important in developing creativity in this new company.
Bearing in mind that the CEO is not a psychologist, your task is to provide a report explaining and applying the psychological insights about online communication and creativity to the scenario, and to discuss the different perspectives that can provide some recommendations for the company to move forward.
Student notes for Part 2
Focus
This part of the EMA is intended to assess your skills of thinking critically about an applied scenario, in an area that has a multitude of psychological dimensions.
The report you are being asked to write fits a context in which an organisation is planning some organisational change. There are two main issues: the first relates to the use of online communication in an online dating context. The second relates to creativity and the CEO's desire to create a company that is highly creative. Your focus should therefore be on what the company needs to know about online communication and about creativity as applied to this context.
Sample Solution