Course overview

Course overview#

What is this course about?#

Course description#

Introduction to innovation using computer science, information technology and critical thinking through a discipline-specific team project to address open-ended problems with real-world relevance and personal impact. Students will

learn what innovation is (and isn’t), learn processes that innovators follow,
conduct interviews with real-world customers to gather important decision requirements and guidance,
experience how innovation teams work together to overcome technical, philosophical and resource-based conflicts,
learn how to make difficult decisions in technology projects,
use prototyping and refinement in the innovation process, and
apply the tools required to successfully deliver and communicate an innovation project at various stages.

Learning outcomes#

After successfully completing this course, students should be able to

Work independently as part of a team with diverse backgrounds towards authentic IT innovation solutions
Apply innovation processes to open ended problems
Collect and analyse data about people and problems
Design and prototype innovation solutions to identified open ended problems
Communicate problems and solution to technical and non-technical stakeholders

But what does this mean in normal words?#

What will I do? You will work in teams of 3-4 to build a minimum viable product. You will follow an innovation process called Lean startup, which is commonly used in startups to ensure that they are creating products and services that people will actually want.

Importantly though, this course is about learning how to do innovation in a real environment. This will be a real project that you can take further if you want. You will gather data from real people. You will work in a real team with a real manager. The problem that you work on will be open-ended, which means that there are many possible ways to approach the problem, no fixed criteria for when we are “finished”, and the teaching staff don’t know what the best answer is.

Note

Open-endedness is note the same as “vague”. A vague project is one in which the vision is unclear or imprecise. A problem or vision can be perfectly clear, but still have many potential solutions that we can continue improving on for many years. A vague project is one where we don’t have a vision, and don’t know the problem. This results in confusion and incomplete answers. Part of this course will be applying processes and techinques to help clarify problems and solutions.

This course is about real-world practice. In this course, we aim to emulate a real-world working environment. This means the following:

There are no grades – just a pass/fail. This is similar to an annual performance review – either you are meeting expectations or you are not.
There are no ‘answers’. The course staff don’t know the solution to the problem you will tackle any more than you do. Your team is responsible for finding good solutions.
You will work under supervision of someone who will not make decisions for you, but will help you to figure out how to make decisions.
You will work in a team that you are assigned to, rather than a group of your friends (although we hope they become your friends).
All members of the team will be ultimately responsible for the outcomes of the project; but by necessity, you will need to coordinate for individuals to lead different tasks.
You will have to make progress regularly; e.g. weekly, rather than just waiting for an assignment and then doing it all at the last minute.
You will be asked to work in a professional manner.

This course is about failure.

“Good decisions come from experience. Experience comes from making bad decisions.” – Mark Twain.

“We hire people who have experience not just because of their successes but also because of their failures. Failures offer learning opportunities and increase the chance that you won’t make the same mistake again.” – Tina Seelig,

Time and time again, failure has been shown to be hugely important in learning.

This course, and innovation more generally, is about trying things and failing.

A strong focus on the course is: fail early. The ideas in these notes come from people who have tried and failed. People like Steve Blank, Tina Seelig, and Eric Ries thought they had good ideas, built products and services, and then failed. They learnt the hard way that building a product and failing is costly and time consuming. However, they realised from experience that the reasons why their products failed could have been known earlier — they just weren’t asking the right questions at the right time.

If we come up with an idea that we think is good, but isn’t, how can we learn it is not a good idea before we commit a lot of resources to it?

This course uses well-known processes and methods from innovation to help us determine, as early as possible, that our idea sucks and we need to change.

Why should I learn about innovation?#

You may be thinking: but I don’t want to run my own startup company – why should I learn about innovation?

We believe that everyone should learn what innovation is, what innovation is not, how people innovate, and how to turn innovative ideas into reality.

Further, innovation is not the same an entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship is about setting up businesses. Innovation is about creating value. They are clearly related – a business will not be successful if it doesn’t bring value to people. However, all of us can be innovative in our work, whether we run a startup, lead a research lab (like me), work in a large organisation, or even just at home.

Innovation is about finding out people’s problems and trying to solve them. You can do this internally within an organisation to bring value to other parts of the organisation. This is sometimes called intrapreneurship.

Key elements of COMP1100#

Your legends#

Each team will have a legend. A legend is a staff member that is assigned to help the team throughout the semester by providing guidance and feedback on how the team and individuals are going. These are similar to mentors, tutors, or demonstrators, but their role is very different in this course compared to others. They won’t be grading you, they won’t be teaching you directly – they will be more like a mentor and manager within an organisation. They will be of such use to you that you will consider them legends by the end of this course.

Grading#

COMP1100 uses competency-based assessment, and is a straightforward pass/fail course. That means that you will not get a numerical grade from 1-7, as is common in course at UQ.

The grade is excluded from calculation of your GPA, unless you receive a failing grade, in which case it is counted as a 2 for your GPA.

Why pass/fail? COMP1100 brings students together using an innovation process as a vehicle for getting teams to collaborate, learn about teamwork, innovation, and related topics. As Jesse Stommel[1] and others show, if students are immediately hung up on their grade and its effect on their GPA, then they focus on grading rubrics/criteria and on taking care of themselves instead of their team. This is fair enough – we give incentives and students respond to those. However, this leads to dysfunctional teams and poor learning.

A pass/fail grading scheme mitigates the class trying to fit their process and project to specific grading criteria, and instead engages students with learning the competency that is required from the course. Further, for many students in their first year of university, it can be difficult to tackle more open-ended problems and the ambiguity inherent in innovation projects, particularly under the pressure of a grade. A pass/fail grading scheme that rewards people for trying, failing, contributing, and learning, allows them to take risks such as setting goals they find challenging.

So this means there is no assessment, right? No deadlines?! No, sorry. Like any real project, we have deliverables and those deliverables have deadlines. Intermediate deadlines are important in projects to both ensure that the project is on track, and also to help motivate us (deadlines are known to be excellent at focusing people’s attention).

So I can just do well for the first 6-7 weeks and then stopping trying to get to 50%? Nope, sorry. There are no grades throughout. To pass, you need to work consistently on your project, and with high quality. You also need to demonstrate on ALL competency criteria.

How do I know if I’m doing enough to pass? If you need to ask that question, you are probably not doing enough. By this, I mean, if you are trying to game the system by putting in just the minimum amount of work, then yes, you risk failing. A pass is not doing 50% of the project – it is doing all of the project and doing it well. You can ensure that you pass by doing what is expected of you and trying your best.

Despite no grades, there will still be regular feedback on both teams and individuals as to how they are doing. Any individual who fails this course will not be surprised that they fail as they will have had multiple items of feedback letting them know that they are on track to fail.

Competency criteria#

In this course, we use a competency-based assessment approach. This means that a pass is not possible just by demonstrate some of the content: individuals must demonstrate all criteria up to a particular standard. This is similar to how employees are assessed in annual reviews.

We have to groups of competency criteria that we expect each student to demonstrate: (1) innovation criteria; and (2) teamwork criteria.

Innovation: The innovation criteria specify that each individual demonstrates via their behaviour that they understand and can apply the Lean Startup process to an open-ended problem:

Competency	Description
Problem and solution identification	Demonstrate the ability to frame open-ended problems by articulating well-reasoned, testable hypotheses about customers, markets, and products.
Customer discovery	Critically design and conduct customer/user research (using techniques including interviews) that yields meaningful insights.
Value proposition	Construct and justify a unique value proposition that clearly aligns customer needs with a feasible and innovative solution.
Minimum viable product (MVP)	Design an MVP that prioritises features for testing the core assumptions of the value proposition, and explain the rationale behind those choices.
Experiment design	Design and justify experiments that effectively test key hypotheses, demonstrating an understanding of experimental design principles.
Refine or pivot	Use evidence from data to make and justify decisions about refining or pivoting the product or strategy.
Prototype	Create prototypes that are purposefully designed to elicit specific feedback, and reflect on how the feedback informs next steps.
Communication	Communicate product ideas clearly and persuasively to a target audience, using appropriate formats and storytelling techniques.
Software implementation	Attempt a digital implementation of an MVP that demonstrates growth in programming skills, with reflection on challenges faced and lessons learned.

Note: As this course is a 1st-year course and some (many?) people in it have limited programming experience, the point of this criterion is to build programming experience, not to deliver a high-quality solution.

But! Every team member must contribute to the implementation/coding of their project, irrelevant of their experience.

Importantly, the innovation competency criteria above are not tied to the quality of a final product. This is a time-bounded project (15 weeks), and if teams continue to work and test their ideas, but by the end of the project they have not found a good solution that fits a market, this is OK. Innovation sometimes takes time – longer than we have in course. What matters is that you successfully apply innovation methods to fail early and learn. The key word in criterion 3 above is “compelling”: your ideas must be consistent with what you know so far and the ideas you generate must be serious and compelling.

Teamwork: The teamwork criteria specify that each individual demonstrates via their behaviour that they can work as an independent person as part of a larger team:

Competency	Description
Collaboration	Actively collaborate with members of your team by contributing ideas, supporting others, and participating in shared decision-making processes.
Planning	Demonstrate the ability to plan effectively for both individual and team tasks, including setting goals, anticipating challenges, and adapting plans as needed.
Tools	Select and use appropriate collaboration tools to enhance team communication, coordination, and productivity, with reflection on their effectiveness.
Self-reflection	Reflect critically on your role and performance within the team, identifying strengths, areas for growth, and strategies for improvement.
Responsibility	Take ownership of assigned tasks, meet deadlines reliably, and demonstrate accountability to the team through consistent follow-through.
Professionalism and ethics	Act with professionalism, respect, inclusivity, and integrity in all team, staff and customer interactions, and reflect on how your behavior contributed to a positive team culture.

Assessment deliverables#

The “assessment” in this course is done throughout the semester. However, to be consistent with UQ policy, we will have four main assessment items and deliverables on your project throughout the semester:

Weekly: Attend and participate in the weekly studios.
16:00, Thursday 04/09/2025 – Testing the problem: Submit a business model canvas, a set of verified/refuted hypotheses, and transcripts and audio recordings of interviews done so far that demonstrates that the team has a clear and accurate understanding of their customer problems.
16:00, Thursday 25/09/2025 – Testing the solution: Submit a business model canvas, a set of verified/refuted hypotheses, transcripts and audio recordings of interviews, and documentation (pictures, digital files) of any paper prototype used so far that demonstrates whether the solution solves the customer problem (product-market fit).
16:00, Monday 13/11/2025 – Minimum viable product: Submit a business model canvas, a set of verified/refuted hypotheses, transcripts and audio recordings of interviews, and a minimal viable product (working software) that demonstrates whether the product solves the customer problem.

Deliverables 2-4 will be submitted via Github and Blackbaord. Details on submissions will be discussed in the seminars and studios.

In addition, for deliverables 2-4, each individual will submit a short self-reflection.

Late penalty: 100%.

The late penalty for assessment is 100% – that is, failure to submit to the deadlines would result in a fail for that assessment, and therefore the course. Why so tough? First, there are many cases in a profession IT environment where deadlines are hard: submitting a tender or grant, software related to events on a fixed date that cannot be moved, submitting reports for regulatory compliance, submitting financial reports, and even alignment with external partner deadlines (e.g. vendors). Extensions in these cases are simply not possible, and contingency must be built into any planning. Learning how to do this in an environment where failure is contained (i.e. only affects you and nobody else) is useful. Second, the deliverables due for this course are simply a culmination of your activity in the previous weeks, so last minute cramming to a deadline is not going to add much value. As such, submitting on time is straightforward – you simply submit what you have done so far. If the work so far is not considered up to scratch, the team will be asked to improve and re-submit.

Generative AI policy#

Students are permitted to use generative AI or any machine translation technology as part of this course. This use must be clearly referenced.

Generative AI cannot be used to:

Fabricate data as part of the innovation process.
Deceive a person that they are communicating with a real person when they are not.

It can be used to:

Help generate ideas for solutions (but will not be very good at it in many cases).
Provide ideas on how to structure interviews, documents, reports, etc.
Help to generate source code.
Provide direction on how to solve problems.
Guide you in writing a self reflection.

Communication#

Communication between the class and the course staff will occur in a few different ways.

General communication. The COMP1100 Microsoft Teams channel will be the primary mode of asking general questions about the course; e.g. about deliverables, confusion about notes, etc. Anything that is about the course and not about you or your team should be posted here.

If you email course staff with a general question, we will ask you to post to the discussion board. If you have a question, it is quite probable that someone else in the class will have that same question.

Communication of a team or personal nature. If you need to communicate with staff about something sensitive about yourself or your team, you should contact the course staff. In the first instance, please discuss with your COMP1100 legend if that is suitable.

If you cannot resolve this or if your legend asks you to contact the course coordinators, please contact directly via the COMP1100 email address COMP1100@eecs.uq.edu.au.

Communication with your team. We will set up a class MS Teams workspace and create private channels for each team and their legend. This can be used for day-to-day team communication, including with the team legend.

Expectations#

Our expectations from you#

There are some basic behaviours that we expected from everyone enrolled in this course:

Attend the seminar and studio every week during the semester.
Actively participate with your team in studios.
Don’t stop others from learning.
Work hard on the project most weeks.
Get out of the building and talk to potential users/customers.
Stay open-minded.
Be flexible and self-directed.
Be curious.
Behave professionally and ethically.
Learn stuff and have fun while doing it!

What can you expect from us?#

We will discuss this is week 1. For now, here are some things we imagine that you would expect from the course stuff:

Attend and give the seminar every week.
Set some goals and activities for studios every week.
Give some pointers and directions to achieve those goals when you are stuck.
Give advice on the processes that you need to follow.
Providing regular (positive and negative) feedback on deliverables and weekly contributions.
Respond to queries on MS Teams within one working day.
Helping you to navigate to realistic solutions.

Weekly format#

Each week, the course will be broken into four components:

Innovation seminar (1 hours) [Attendance expected, but not compulsory]: This is where we discuss the key concepts in innovation and what teams are expected to be doing on their project over the following weeks.
Teamwork studio (2 hours) [Compulsory attendance]: This is a studio where teams will build the key skills required to work as a team on an innovation project. Regular participation is in the studios is one of the assessment items.
Planning and working hour (1 hour) [Optional attendance]: At the end of the teamwork studio, teams will an hour available in the studio spaces to work on their project with the presence of their legends.
Project work [No attendance]: For the rest of the work, the team is expected to spend 6-7 hours working on their project; e.g. gathering data, meeting with each other, planning, designing, implementing, etc.

Schedule#

Week	Start	Seminar date	Seminar topic	Studio	Course deliverables	What should teams be doing this week?
1	24-Feb	27-Feb	What is innovation and why should all of us care about it?	Growth mindset and personal goals		Finding someone to form a team with
2	03-Mar	6-Mar	The customer discovery process	Team dynamics		Meet your team, Start coming up with ideas to solve your challenge, Sketching customer problem hypotheses
3	10-Mar	13-Mar	Business model canvas, Value proposition canvas	Cancelled		Identify some interview questions, Each team member interview 2-3 customers
4	17-Mar	20-Mar	Experimentation: Testing and validation	Team planning, planning tools		Refine your product ideas, Update questions, Each team member interview 3-4 more customers
5	24-Mar	27-Mar	Minimal viable products and competitor analysis	Repositories and version control, markdown		Start formulating solutions, Research your competitors, Formalise your hypotheses using test cards
6	31-Mar	3-Apr	Prototyping	Reflective Practice, use of repositories for COMP1100	Business model canvas iteration 1	Validate your customer segment and value proposition hypotheses, Define a clear value proposition
7	07-Apr	10-Apr	Customer relationships and channels	Feedback		Identifying MVP hypotheses using test cards, Defining first paper prototypes, Gathering data to test MVP hypotheses
8	14-Apr	17-Apr	Personal planning and getting things done	Paper prototyping		Sketching out the main features of an MVP, Finalising MVP hypotheses using learning cards, Sketching early digital prototypes (if using)
	21-Apr		Mid-semester break			Plan which team members will implement which features of the MVP, Choose any frameworks, languages, etc., Starting implementing MVP
9	28-Apr	1-May	Prompt engineering	MVP definition	Business model canvas iteration 2	Continuing implementing MVP
10	05-May	8-May	Scoping	Labour day holiday: no workshops on any day		Continuing implementing MVP
11	12-May	15-May	No lecture	How to give a pitch		Continuing implementing MVP
12	19-May	22-May	History of computing, final submission requiremetns	Teams work on MVP implementation		Continuing implementing MVP, First draft of 1-minute pitch and 5-minute presentation
13	25-May	29-May	No lecture	Team presentations		Continuing implementing MVP, Finalise 1-minute pitch and 5-minute presentation
Exams week 1	9-Jun				Prototype and business model canvas iteration 3	Finalise implementation of MVP

Projects#

This semester, we present the following challenges for teams to focus their projects on.

Takeaways#

Takeaways

This course is about software innovation in small teams.
You will undertake a small innovation project in a team of (about) 4.
The course is pass/fail.
Each student is expected to attend seminars and studios every week, and to contribute to their team in a professional manner.