Problems Facing Lifestyle Retailer Urban Outfitters

PURPOSE
This assignment builds on the entire course journey, focusing on a particular organization you select to assist by associating your learning from the course to develop your marketing, new product development, and innovation capabilities. The organization can be for-profit, non-profit, or a government agency located anywhere in the world, as long as you prepare for this assignment thoroughly, with the support of relevant literature and external sources, and preferably interviewing someone from the company.
The assignment aims to associate your newly captured insights with an organization of your choice. Choose an organization you are passionate about that could do with your expertise. Consider this an excellent opportunity to reflect and advise the chosen organization in growing its design thinking and innovation capacity in times of considerable uncertainty.
GUIDANCE
Please complete the following tasks:
Review all course materials and team assignment-related materials again.
Explore and decide on a target organization you are excited about and want to advise.
Make a deep dive market research based on published materials, observation, and personal email or live interviews to scope a significant problem worth solving in the organization context.
The problem could relate to something the organization could do significantly better.
Based on research findings, design a novel and intriguing solution by applying design and business thinking described in the course and other materials covered.
Write all this in an executive-level advisory report, which your target company can use as a base for action in their next leadership meeting.
Remember to reference actively written and interviewed sources.
DELIVERABLES
Cover with heading and name, max six pages of pure text with page numbering and subheadings as requested: professional document with APA references, unlimited number of complete appendices including relevant and readable tables, graphs, images, etc. Font 12, 1.0 spacing, and standard margins.
Note: executives are busy people who crave evidence to make sound decisions, so ensure you stick to the core, reference, and if you need more pages, refer to relevant appendices in the main text.
Before starting this assignment, check the rubric for what determines a quality contribution.
You are expected to submit a detailed description of your problem-solution set for the chosen organization by referring actively to relevant sources to strengthen your problem argument and then responding to the following critical areas of importance (use these headings):
Introduction and Problem Statement: Introduce the paper by leading the reading to the theme, the problem, and critical findings, along with a brief document flow overview. Remember to briefly introduce your chosen organization and any key stakeholders you plan to advise.
Market Research: Identify and define the problem area based on your research findings regarding currency, relevancy, and societal and business significance (actively referenced, both academically and professionally).
Associate to course learnings: Apply the skill of associating as described in the course materials by identifying critical insights from the course and your individual and small group work. Discuss these essential insights and use them as inspiration when describing how they can help develop a solution to the organization's current problem. As you may recall, associating is the idea that you borrow ideas from one area and then use them as inspiration in another.
The Problem-Solution Fit: Describe your solution and provide evidence to the extent possible that it solves the problem as defined in this paper.
Concluding Discussion: Conclude by arguing, based on your newly gathered research and analyzed intelligence, why solving this problem is worthwhile, especially from a business and data collection perspective. Why is it novel and fresh, despite potential competition / alternative solutions? Finally, list concrete actions for your client to proceed and succeed in building a state-of-the-art solution.
Personal Reflection: Discuss critical findings from this assignment and the course at large for yourself; what was most valuable learning? Discuss how you enhanced your knowledge throughout the course.
Reference List
Appendices