Innovation

I'll stop the weekly description, as it's not always that interesting to write about each week :P

Past 2 weks I've spent time to fix my research and set up an innovations workshop where the final case we'd be handling would be my own project, as I needed a brainstorm, and this way there would be plenty of people to help me out, and they wouldn't feel like they were just helping me out, as they got the workshop on how to do a proper brainstorm :)

For me, the day started at DAF around 8:30, getting stuff to the room where the workshop takes place, taking the tea and coffee from the cafeteria to the “Foundry of Innovation”. In the meantime encountering some students that had arrived, and waiting at the entrance for some more to arrive which didn’t happen. There should’ve been 8 students there to join me, as I had little reaction to the invitation in the first place, and 2 people just didn’t show up (one arrived later because of a meeting).

At 9:30 I started the workshop by giving the students a small assignment where they had to count squares in an image, and then doubling the result myself to show them you have to think outside the box, which surprised them quite a bit. The squares are an example of pattern thinking, which I explained after that, telling them pattern thinking is a good thing, though not for every problem.

Then I explained “the box”, what it’s made of and what’s in it. Which also gave them an idea of what they had to break through.

Next were a few exercises to show them they are used to pattern thinking and that thinking outside the box isn’t always that easy. Because of the pattern thinking, they also had assumptions with some of the exercises. At any rate, they thought the exercises gave them a good view of how they approach certain things they think about.

After that, the workshop came to the point that was the most important, as I’d now explain the creative process itself. Starting with a story about 2 cod fishers that had a problem, and what ideas they came to in the end after brainstorming a bit.

To explain the creative process, they were given a practice case, for which I had already created some examples. The next topic was the start phase of a creative process, where they first do some exercises to boost creative thinking (which they’d already done this time). Next was the briefing for the practice case, after which they had to come up with a problem formulation. Writing down a concrete problem formulation was quite hard for them, so in the end I gave them one that I had prepared, and explained how I got to it.

The next phase is the diverging phase, which is the biggest phase in a creative process. Before going to this phase though, I showed them some idea killers, words that cannot be said during any brainstorm, no matter what. One of the students however said he’ll have trouble with that, as he’s a technical minded person. With the diverging phase, you start out with the initial purge of ideas. From this purge, we already got quite a few ideas.

With the initial ideas running dry, I started explaining some methods to generate more ideas, starting with changing the assumptions that are found within the problem formulation. Next I gave them some analogies, which also led to more ideas.

 

The next technique was the superhero technique, which did make them excited and gave them more ideas, finally getting some more ridiculous ideas. It was hard to get the students to act on these ideas, as the craziest ideas usually lead to the most original ones.

When that didn’t really happen, I moved on to the next technique, flukes. Picking a random word from a book or magazine, and writing down associations with that, which you can then associate with the problem you’re trying to solve. This led to some ideas, but it’s quite hard to think of ideas when you’re associating them with a, usually, totally unrelated term. I also explained a bit about free incubation, but that’s something you can’t really do in a day.

With these techniques, we were able to generate quite a few ideas and start the converging phase to narrow down the ideas. The first technique used for this is the COCD box, in which we separated the ideas we had between the 3 categories (the top left are ideas we couldn’t fit in a category).

Because of a lack of time, only one idea made it through the final step, where you shape, judge, and enrich the idea. This gave a few sketches and some extra information for the idea.

One of the students had to leave at this point because of an important meeting she had after lunch.

After the lunch I had 2 cases prepared, the first was an example from a book that I used, the second was my own case, on the CB radio.

We first started with the toothbrush case. This case was over quite quickly, as every student was stuck at some of the same ideas and when using the different techniques to generate ideas, they always came back to the same ones. Because of this the case was thrown aside to go to the next case, which for me was the most important part of this workshop.

I was getting pretty tired from the 2 previous brainstorms I had led, so it was harder for me to properly lead this one as well, but I managed well enough.

For my own case, we used my own problem formulation from the project, and started brainstorming on that. There weren’t as much ideas as with the previous brainstorms, which I only later understood why, as most people said they were getting quite tired from all the brainstorming. After a small purge of ideas, I tried to use the techniques, but those also generated little ideas. Another reason for this is that the project itself has quite a small scope because of the different restrictions which make it hard to go wild with the brainstorm. It did give me a few good ideas, where the main one was to include specific functions from the truck into the system, like the time they had left to drive before they have to take a break.

At the end I let the students fill in a feedback form, to see what they thought of the workshop and the cases I had. This was quite positive, with a few tips. The first part of the workshop, where I taught them how to do everything, was quite successful, the second part after lunch, where I handled the 2 cases, was less successful.

All in all it was an interesting experience for me, as I did like teaching them about the creative process, although that is probably partially because of the subject, this gives a lot of options to make the students participate more than a usual lesson. I did notice that leading a brainstorm is harder than I thought, in school it was usually a collective task, as everyone knew what to do, here I was the sole leader. Next to the fact that it was hard to keep everyone on track, it was really tiring.

However, I do think the workshop was worth giving, let that be clear!