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Peer Review

Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship

Reviewed:
Jun 11, 2020 by Business
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Ratings

Overall Rating: 4.8 stars
Content Quality: 4.8 stars
Effectiveness: 4.8 stars
Ease of Use: 4.8 stars
Overview:

THE CASE FOR LEARNING ABOUT MEDIA ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN IMPORTANT GATEWAY TO YOUR FUTURE If you are enrolled in a journalism or communications program, you should shudder if your school never teaches you how to post stories to a content management system. You should flinch if you hear the word “convergence“[1] dominating course offerings but never hear about design thinking or audience-engagement strategies. And while you should pursue grammar literacy, be wary if you are not learning how to parse the language and patterns of disruptive innovation, particularly the media disruption happening in front of you daily. As U.S. journalism and mass communications programs revamp to prepare you to succeed in today’s rapidly evolving media landscape, there is—bar none—no better place to embrace and refine nearly every skill you will need to know than learning about media entrepreneurship and innovation. In the course of envisioning, prototyping and launching, you will integrate multimedia production, social media distribution, design thinking,[2] data collection and analysis, and audience engagement strategies. As added benefits, you will develop business skills, begin to understand how to develop a product, how to discover customers, and how to manage all these activities so that you can deliver a new entrepreneurial startup. Or you may go the intrapreneurial route and spearhead a new venture inside your existing media organization.

Type of Material:

Open Textbook

Recommended Uses:

Individual, self-paced, reading, homework

This could be a required or supplemental text for entreprenurship courses, communications, or media strategies course

Technical Requirements:

Mozilla Firefox 74.0

Browser; Adobe Acrobat reader to view the download version of the text.

Identify Major Learning Goals:
  • Understand digital smarts to interact with customers/users
  • Identify business/entrepreneurial opportunities
  • Engage audiences
  • Develop data skills
  • Build revenues
  • Pitch ideas
Target Student Population:
  • Upper-division media students
  • Upper-division advertising students
  • Upper-division entrepreneur students
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

A basic business, marketing, or communications background.

Content Quality

Rating:
Strengths:
  • Content is clear and concise
  • Could be adapted easily to a course or as a stand-alone material
  • Gives good definitions and strong, fairly recent examples
  • The text provides good foundations and applications for entrepreneurs, and students studying entrepreneurship.  
  • Each module contains clear learning objectives.
  • Topics are clearly identified, and the sequence of topics is appropriate.
Concerns:
  • Could use more examples and visuals throughout
  • Rapidly changing/updating field, so will need constant updating
  • Somewhat dense with text in places

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:
Strengths:
  • Easy to integrate into a course as a text resource
  • Chapters divided into segments for efficiency
  • Identifies learning objectives that can be integrated and measured
  • Activities built into the chapters
  • Individual topics/units could be assigned for specific content coverage 
  • As an open text, instructors can adapt the usage as best fits into the course
Concerns:
  • No pre-requisite information
  • Could use a bit more building on concepts
  • While much of the information comes from the arena of journalism, there is a strong component that requires some solid business foundational learning.
  • There does not appear to be much in that will actively engage students.  It is basically reading material.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:
Strengths:
  • Very easy to use – just a text
  • Instructions (aka read) are clear
  • Mostly accessible, no major accessibility issues
  • Quite responsive, clean, concise, and consistent in design. 
  • Appears that the publishers have address accessibility issues--with a discussion/statement included with instructor resources.
Concerns:
  • Could use more visuals to be more engaging in the more text dense chapters
  • There is a link for instructor resources, which basically provide videos on how to use the text, and then Innovation Icebreakers videos.  
  • Instructors will need to develop their own assignments, quizzes and test materials if needed.
Other Issues and Comments:
  • Will have to keep on top for most recent examples as it is a field that is constantly evolving
  • Some chapters are text dense, so more visuals
  • Could integrate videos
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