Andrew Lapham, MSc, presented a guide for awarding organisations on how to make innovation happen.
Representing RM’s consultancy team at the 2025 e-Assessment Association conference, Andrew offered practical insight into how to confidently navigate digital transformation-beyond buzzwords and into actionable change.
The capability of enabling technology now available at people’s fingertips continues to develop across all industries including healthcare, manufacturing and education:
In an increasingly digital world, awarding organisations face mounting pressure to innovate; to modernise systems and services without compromising rigour, trust or compliance.
“How do you make innovation happen?” Andrew asked his audience at the e-AA conference. “It's tricky because everyone actually wants to get operational and successful, but they don't necessarily want to stop and innovate. Technological possibility is increasing. As a result, the gap between reality and possibility is wide apart right now.”
Using the example of Apple’s commercially successful iPhone, Andrew explained the importance of knowing why you need to innovate. The iPhone brought together a number of components - communication, media consumption and internet access - in a highly engaging, attractive way, so it was innovative in that sense. Knowing why they need to innovate gives people the motivation to step into change and allow it to happen.
Andrew outlined a number of techniques for making innovation happen:
This looks at the novelty and usefulness of an innovation. It involves generating new concepts, which Andrew described as “new dots to join” or connect. This may involve discovering something that you didn’t previously know existed, or just using something you previously knew about, but applying it in a different way in order to add value to your technology or process and make a positive difference - for example, in terms of profit or social impact.
Innovation is about finding the sweet spot between customer needs, available technology and profitable business models. It involves looking at the student or organisational demand (customer desirability), market viability (what is going on in the competitive landscape) and technology feasibility (which is changing very rapidly) and providing innovation that balances between the 3.
The way people think develops over their lifetime, influenced by education and experience to help them move forwards and solve problems.
Assessment boards create a syllabus and a framework that will satisfy what they are trying to assess. Assessment is there to provide certificates and provide outputs but it's predominantly there to prepare people for work or for academia or for service.
“If you take the logical part of your brain and the creative part, what often happens as people get more experienced and more educated, is that they get really good at critical thinking and jump to the answer and decide quite quickly,” said Andrew. “In order to be more innovative, spend more time exploring a problem or situation with the creative side of the brain first before using the logical side.”
This is what people tend to do when they are younger and don’t have the knowledge or experience to fall back on.
Organisational or group constraint, regulatory frameworks and rubrics can stop creative thinking within assessment. Organisations can constrain people by telling them how they should think and by not tolerating ambiguity.
There are also individual constraints, such as the way people think, as well as technological, cultural and social constraints, but by changing the context and introducing new tools to encourage creative thinking, it allows you and your team to explore alternatives to come up with a more innovative solution.
“When you are given a problem, don’t just jump to the solution. Take a little bit of time to explore it, have a look at it,”said Andrew. He suggested “chunking down” the problem - breaking it into smaller, more manageable issues to consider.
Spend time to really think about the problem - possibly drafting then re-drafting the problem statement, then looking at it in different ways. Ask others what they think and take them with you on the journey. Try to align diverse stakeholders, maintain engagement over time and build a shared vision for long-term value.
Andrew concluded that the way to make innovation happen is to look at:
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