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Development of Evidence Based Recommendations

Purpose of the assignment:  

This assignment is designed to get you to think more deeply about Part 2 of how you might solve the overall management challenge and why your chosen approach could be the “best way.”  Whereas your goal in A1 (Part 1) was to analyse what the FFCRC does as an R&D organisation, the goal of A2 (Part 2) is to analyse a particular energy product created by Engie Energy Resources (listed below).  In A3 (Part 3), you will bring what you have learned in A1 and A2 together to design a business model / roadmap for FFCRC to present to Engie Energy Resources about how they could work together to commercialise that product.

Overall management challenge: The FFCRC, as an R&D organisation, helps energy businesses design solutions to technical & management problems.  In this instance, the FFCRC is trying to help Engie Energy Resources design a business plan (roadmap) to commercialise the technical products they have created at the REIDS-SPORE Demonstration project. Details about the demonstration project are in the videos found HERE:

• Multi-fuel microgrid (green electricity) = wind turbine (Links to an external site.), solar energy (Links to an external site.) panels, hydrogen fuel, (Links to an external site.) and hydrogen battery storage
• Mobility products = hydrogen fueled electric vehicle (Links to an external site.) + hydrogen recharging station
• Sustainable data centre = efficient, green power use towards running cloud computing platforms (Links to an external site.)
• District cooling (Links to an external site.) = working with Singapore based JTC

Information on what hydrogen is and how it is made can be found HERE (Links to an external site.).

For A2, pick only one of these products. Concentrate on building a business case for how it can be used commercially across a range of businesses within one business sector.

Problem:  Your task in this assignment is simply to imagine how this one product might be used and how it could be marketed to various end users both in Singapore (Links to an external site.) and within the ASEAN (Links to an external site.) region.  Consider macro, meso and micro implications as you make the case for the use of this product.  Rather than going broad and general, pick one business sector on which to focus (e.g., banking / finance, automobile production, real estate, e-commerce, etc.)

You may wish to ask the following questions:

• How would the uptake of a ‘green energy’ product help businesses in this sector achieve low emissions goals?
• Why should they strive to achieve these goals?
• What are the financial implications?
• Think about how soft and hard processes (e.g., leadership/culture, ethics/CSR, and/or HRM) would be affected (both +/-) by companies making the choice to purchase and use one of these green energy products?
• How would the use of green energy products help end users achieve their own strategic sustainability goals or contribute to a regional decarbonisation strategy?

Requirements for the assignment:    

• Re-state the problem as a research question
• Undertake a literature review of management literature on energy / sustainability challenges within the business sector you chose.  This review will help you to better understand the nature of the problem, how theory can inform a solution and what (if anything) has been tried before to solve this kind of problem (e.g. Has this kind of challenge occurred before? Maybe in another industry? How has it been solved?)
• Identify and select appropriate scholarly tools, models and theories that will help you to understand the implications the use of this product will have on hard and soft systems within companies in your chosen business sector (e.g., leadership, CSR, ethics, HR, etc.)
  • What kind of leadership and subsequent cultures need to be formed when making the change to use this product? Why and How?
  • Are there ethical aspects we have to consider with internal and external stakeholders?  Why and How?
  • What overall alignment is required between HRM, leadership/culture, and ethics to make sure they all say the same thing when communicating with and motivating employees to support the use of this product?
• The substance of your report is to justify why this product should be adopted by your chosen business sector – remember to use management theory and logic – make sure to support your case with evidence.
• Appendix: Write a 250-word response to the feedback you received in your first assignment and how that feedback informed your approach to structuring this assignment (this response does not apply towards your total word count).

Other useful information:

• You have to cite in text and in the reference list, whenever you borrow somebody’s idea.