Designing the Value of Pedagogical Innovations

Abstract

Despite an increasing pressure to publish, management scholars do find the time to innovate so as to deliver relevant content to students in the best conditions, leading to the development of new and exciting pedagogical innovations. As more and more publications present experiential exercises as a specific type of pedagogical innovation, the question of whether these new exercises will be adopted by others remains open – in particular when they require significant resources and/or outcomes are unsure. Indeed, the innovation literature argues that the relative adoption of innovations reflects their perceived value. In the context of experiential exercises, this suggests that it is important to design the value of the innovation in terms perceivable by management scholars. In this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review of articles introducing new management-related experiential exercises published between 2008 and 2019, in an effort to investigate the most commonly used methods through which creators of new experiential exercises assess the effectiveness of their innovations. Drawing on the concept of value proposition from the innovation literature, we posit that the type of evidence required to provide a compelling case for the adoption of new exercises may in fact depend on the degree to which they represent high or low stake endeavors to users. We then build upon this argument by illustrating how a mixed methods collection strategy may be particularly useful for articulating the value proposition of exercises perceived as reflecting “higher stakes”.