Background

Assume you were a group of business consultants appointed by your assigned company. You are tasked to deliver the following:

-    A thorough analysis on the impact of some specific environmental issues on the business.

-    An initial proposal on how to enhance the company’s sustainability and value creation.

Requirements

In order to successfully complete this final group project, your team must:

•     Work with the same group and on the same assigned company as in Assignment 3 and 4.

•     Apply skills, knowledge, and understanding acquired from ALL TEN modules of the course in a real-world business setting.

•     Evaluate the external business environment and make suggestion basing on consideration of the internal business environment of the assigned company.

•     Discuss stakeholders’ issues and concerns (including ethical issues, if any) relevant to the business environment and your suggestions.

•     Gather credible information and integrate them with your analysis to produce preliminary findings; and apply managerial, decision-making, and communication skills to analyze and communicate your ideas.

•     Make wise use of what you have researched in Assignment 3 and 4 to your final group project report.

•     Adopt visual aids including diagrams, charts, pictures etc. to grab reader’sattention and to enhance their understanding.

•     Adhere to the word limit  of no more than 2,400 words* (excluding references and appendices) for Written Report.

*The penalty for not observing the word limit: 10% of marks will be deducted for work over 2,400 words.

Weighting, deliverables, marks, and due dates

This group project has a written, an oral and a poster design component. It is marked out of 100 and is worth 180 out of 600 marks (equivalent to 30%) of the total course score.

To complete this group project, your group will need to submit a written report,  an infographic poster, and a PowerPoint deck for oral presentation. Your group will also need to tackle the Bizathon challenge, deliver an oral presentation during Bizathon and participate in Business Showcase Days. Your performance will be evaluated both as a group and as an individual. Details of the project components are given below:

Tasks

Inanera marked by increasing awareness of environmental and social challenges, it becomes imperative for companies to integrate sustainable practices into their operations. In this project, your team has to evaluate the specific external environment issues of your assigned company and discuss its impacts to the business. Additionally, your team has to incorporate the findings from the environmental analysis to propose a collaboration with a non- governmental organization (NGO) and outline a simple plan for working together towards a sustainable future.

Part A: Written Report

A1: Introduction and Company Background (200 words)

A1.1 Business and industry overview

A1.2 Existing product / service in focus

A1.3 Existing market in focus

Note: This part serves as an introduction of the whole report, and to provide an updated overview of the assigned company. You should briefly introduce its business and the industry it is operating in. It is important to highlight ONE major product or service and ONE major market as the initial focus of this report.

A2: External business environment analysis (1,100 words)

A2.1 Political environment: Country conflict (300 words)

It is important for businesses to understand the influence of the international political environment as it can present both opportunities and threats to the business. In this session, your objective is to identify and analyze a specific conflict between countries that has occurred within the past two years. The conflict selected should be relevant to your business. Discuss the impact of this conflict on your business, and considering factors from demand, supply or both sides. You should also provide justification with recent and solid evidence to support your arguments.

A2.2 Technological environment: Generative AI (300 words)

Generative AI technology has made significant advancements that revolutionizes various industries. How might the current development of generative AI technology potentially impact your assigned company? You may discuss the potential impact of generative AI technology on company operations, products/services, customer experience and change in  customer preference and habit, and also  competition landscape. Identify specific areas where generative AI technology can bring value and potential challenges that may arise during implementation. You may consider issues such as customer experience and change in preferences, cost, data privacy, bias, and job displacement etc. Justification with recent and solid evidence to support your arguments should be provided.

A2.3 Socio-cultural environment: Trend and changes in demography and revenue potential (200 words)

Your team needs to examine the revenue potential of your assigned company by investigating its relation with the demographic change. You should identify a variable to reflect the revenue potential, for example, the company’s revenue, overall operating cost, and the cost of a major raw material and carry out a regression analysis of the variable against age dependency ratio (% of working-age population) of the economy of the target market to determine the relationship and make inferences. Data of both the variable and the age dependency ratio is required to span over 2011-2022 on an annual basis. The analysis should include explanations for the chosen variables, data collection, least squares  regression model, statistical outputs and interpretation of the findings.

A2.4 Economic environment: Market structure (300 words)

Analyze the influence of ONE of the above political, technological or social factors on the market structure that your assigned company’s major product/service faces. Evaluate how the selected factor shapes the market structure of the product/service. Explain your view with solid and recent evidence.

Your analysis should focus on the potential change in structure impacted by the external environmental factor discussed in this report and include the following aspects:

•      Market competitiveness

•      Shift in power

•      Barriers to entry and exit

A3: Proposed collaboration with a non-governmental organization (NGO) (400 words)

To  enhance business  sustainability,  the management  of your  assigned  company  is interested in partnering with a non-government organization (NGO) for a strategic collaboration. Particularly, your assigned company aims to better achieve the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a special emphasis on diversity and inclusion (D&I). In your proposal for such collaboration, your team should cover the following:

•    A brief introduction of the suggested NGO.

•    How to collaborate between the assigned company and this NGO, e.g., new product/service research development?   Advocacy campaign? Training and development programme? …etc.

•    Explanation of your suggestion in connection with:

-   the environmental analysis findings in this report;

-   the SDGs related to diversity and inclusion;

-   other  factors  or issues to consider that would affect the  sustainability, value creation, or competitiveness of the assigned company.

•    Justification with recent and solid evidence to support your arguments.

A4: Supporting business functional activities and stakeholders’ concerns (500 words)

A4.1 Discuss how the business functions of the assigned company can help to implement the collaboration plan suggested in A3. In this part, you should focus on the

functional activities (of the TWO assigned functions) discussed in Assignment 3

and justify your arguments with recent and solid evidence.

A4.2 Identity TWO important and relevant groups of stakeholders and discuss their potential concerns about the proposed collaboration plan.

A5: Conclusion (200 words)

You should produce a conclusion that summarizes the key findings and recommendations.

Written Report – Writing, organization and use of visual aids

Apart from the content, the written report will be assessed by its writing and overall organization. The writing should be in high clarity with excellent choice of words. Each report section should be well-planned, structured and connected with a highly logical flow. There should be no errors in terms of grammar and spelling and it allows readers to enjoy reading the whole report. Also, creative, sufficient and appropriate use of visual aids is expected to grab reader’s attention, to enhance understanding, and to present the information or arguments professionally.

Written Report - Research evidence and reference list

Your team should organize all the sources of quoted information in APA format to a reference list and provide all important supporting evidence (the key excerpts of original documents/ webpages/ photos / screenshots etc.) in Appendices for showcasing your research and development process of this report.

Part B: Bizathon: Oral Presentation and Bizathon Challenge

During the Bizathon, your group will be assigned a scenario about the future ecosystem and/or globalization that the assigned company will face. In the real business contexts, stakeholders care about sustainable business operations. Managers need to propose plans to prepare for future changes. You will therefore need to investigate the possible impacts of the scenario, and you may need to refine your original analysis and recommendations in the report.

When tackling the given challenge, soft skill assessment will also be conducted during the Bizathon event.

Each assignment group will present the whole project and the Bizathon challenge in a 20-minute  oral presentation in English. Another 5 minutes will be allocated to each group for Q&Asession. All audience groups have to participate in the Q&A session. Absents from the Bizathon event  and/or oral presentation will receive zero mark  for this project Part B. Details  about the  Bizathon and submission arrangement of presentation PowerPoint will be announced in due  course.

Part C: Business Showcase Days: Designing and presenting an infographic poster and joining the Showcase exhibition

Your group will need to design an infographic poster with your final project findings in visuals and graphics. In Module 10 ISS workshop, a ubiquitous technique for varied business needs – infographic design – is taught to equip you with practical skills in preparing an appealing and easy-to-understand pictorial overview of the Final Group Project. The infographic poster will showcase in the exhibitions during Showcase Days. During the event, assignment groups and members will need to conduct Q&A sessions to answer questions from teachers and students.

Remarks:

In order to complete this group project, your group will need to carryout extensive research by visiting the company website and using databases (you may refer to the library handout of using databases available on the OLE). In your report, you are required provide at least three sources of reference from designated database / information source to support your arguments. The list of required database / source will be provided in due course.

You must provide proper referencing for all sources of information used in your report.

It is expected to follow the APA Style (7th edition) created by the American Psychological Association  when  citing   sources  in  their  assignments.  Please  refer  to  the  document ‘Academic writing: Acknowledging your sources’ available on the OLE or visit “Citing Sources of Information” webpage of our library: https://libguides.lib.ouhk.edu.hk/cite/apa (References not included in the word count).

You may include appendices at the end of your report for materials such as photos or images, newspaper articles or extracts, notes taken  from visits, observations, interviews, and/or surveys (Appendices are not included in the word count).

Merit marks will be awarded for accurately and concisely presenting analysis, findings, and recommendations by using appropriate headings, sub-headings, and good writing style in your report.

You must use MS Word to prepare this Group Project and submit it via the OLE before 5 pm on the due date. Please refer to the Course Guide for details about assignment submission procedures.

Each student will have to complete and submit a peer assessment rating the performance of his or her group members in the group project’s written report, oral presentation and poster. Teachers may adjust the marks of individual students based on information provided in the peer assessment. Further instructions on completing the assessment will be given by the core tutors.