Hello. I'm Shlomo Maital. Welcome to our course, Cracking the Creativity Code, How to Discover and Deliver Ideas. Part One. Discovering Ideas. I'm a professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and a Senior Research Fellow at the S Neaman Institute, which is on the campus. It's a think tank. This course was developed by myself and colleague and coauthor Aria Ruthenburg, I'll tell you more about him a little later. I spent my career in academic life, Aria has applied creativity with great success, and that's why I recruited him to help write our book on creativity. I'd like to give you a brief overview of our course before we plunge into the material. So we believe strongly that creativity is an acquired skill. It's a muscle and like any muscle it gets better as you exercise it, as you practice your creativity. The more you practice discovering ideas and implementing them, the better you will get at it. We also believe that creativity changes the world and enriches people's lives. You know, the world is kind of a messy place right now and we are facing kind of a shortage of resources to deal with all the many problems that we face. Global warming, economic problems, inequality, health, illness, lack of literacy, and so on. So we desperately need as much creativity as we can get. Now, creativity implies actually doing something. It's not just about having ideas. So there are two parts to creativity. The first is discovery. Discovering new ideas, new products, new services, new everything, new and better ways to do everything. Creativity everywhere, all the time, in every part of our life. The second part of creativity is delivery, implementing our new ideas, using proven tools and methods of business and management. So part one, our four weeks together is about discovering ideas, how to do that. Part two, we hope you'll take that course as well. Another four week course that's about how we implement the ideas that we have and all of this in order to change the world. [COUGH] My colleague, Arie Ruttenberg and I are very passionate about strengthening your creativity. We feel that you individually, each of you, and together; we all can change the world. We can make the world a better place by simply strengthening our creativity and practicing it. Somebody once said, things we do for ourself, those things they kind of die when we leave this world. But things we do for others using our creativity, those things last forever. So, enhance creativity, everywhere, everyone, everywhere, all the time. It's our best solution for making the world a better place. Let me provide an overview of the two four-week courses. This is part one. So in part one, we'll offer you a structured method, for generating and implementing world changing ideas. We call this method, zoom in, zoom out, and zoom in. And it makes creativity accessible to everyone. We work with companies and organizations. Our message to them is, it's not just the boss who has the great ideas. Some of the ideas come from the person running the warehouse. Creativity on the part of everyone to tackle challenging real world needs. In part two, delivering ideas, we teach you how to test your ideas so that you avoid implementing ideas that really aren't so strong. How to scale an idea up to perhaps a global business. How to create a learning organization? How to identify real needs so that you don't waste your time inventing things that nobody wants or needs? How do you start a business without money? How to start a social enterprise which is not aimed at making profit, but simply wants to help a lot of people, but still has to be properly run. How can you be an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur creatively creating ideas inside a big organization? How do you write a business plan? So all of that will be discussed in part two. So back to part one. This four week course. This is about discovery. We want to give you proven tools and frameworks that will help you personally generate an endless stream of creative ideas. And we think that during our four weeks together, you will become measurably better at the creative process, and we have ways of testing that. Our goal is to empower you. I teach creativity and innovation in many places, and I've taught this for over 40 years, and I've encountered many managers, many students of management, MBA students. They believe they've lost it. They're creativity has become rusty. And the reason is they work for employers, big companies usually. And the big companies want them to do their job and do it well, and do the same thing today that they did yesterday, and do it again tomorrow. That's called discipline, or efficiency, or productivity. And they pay lip service, these organizations to creativity. But the truth is, what they really want is for you to just do your job and get on with it. And so many people I teach feel they've lost their creative powers. But they haven't. They haven't. They've just become a little rusty. And by exercising our creative powers, we can restore them and change the world. That's what our course is about, and that's what we're very passionate about. Now, sometimes we believe that creativity is having eureka moments, having these brainstorm ideas But the fact is you need a method for generating ideas. And we present you with a method in our course that makes creativity accessible to everyone. And then we ask you to practice this method with your fellow students, and then tackle some really, really tough problems that the world is facing now. So we're going to give you seven really hard challenges. And each challenge represents something people, many people, really need, but don't have yet. And we'll ask you to find creative ways to satisfy that need. And then, at the end of the course, your final project will be to present your ideas in a two minute video and share it with other students. And your fellow students will evaluate the quality of your ideas, your solutions, to one of these seven challenges. The second four week course will guide you through a series of methods that help you take your idea, and then make it happen. Deliver it, implement it, create products, bring it to the world, and help a lot of people enrich their lives by using your ideas. You can take either just part one or just part two, or you can take them both. Depending on your interests and needs, these courses are self-standing. So how creative do you think you really are, and what part of creativity Do you really do best. Is it discovery? Do you generate huge numbers of ideas? Or is it delivery? Are you really good at implementing, and at managing? The creative journey begins with a look deep inside each of us, deep inside yourself. What are you passionate about, what are you good at? What do you really, really love to do? I'd like to quote an educator named Kenneth Robinson. I'm going to quote him at length later, who, who writes to say that creativity is finding what you love to do when you're playing, and then use that to become your work and to make your living. So that's a crucial part of creativity is doing things that you love. So, what are we talking about here? What is discovery? Discovery is generating novel and useful ideas, that satisfy unmet needs. That last part is very important. True creativity, discovery of ideas often usually should begin with finding something, where someone has a problem. Someone has a challenge, or a large number of people. And we use our creativity to help meet that, that desperate need. Delivery is taking our idea, how we can solve this, how we can solve global warming, poverty, illness, how we can tackle these things. Taking our creative idea, and then finding the way to make it happen. In India, I'll present a case study later about a group of people who wanted to bring medical care, health care, to people in poor Indian villages who didn't have access to health care. That was the need they identified, and they found a unique way to resolve it. And the way that they resolved it was by using the real system. Sowe will talk about that a little more later. Before we go on I'd like to introduce my colleague Matryoshka. Matryoshka travels with me when I teach creativity and innovation. And Matryoshka helps me teach a very important point about discovery and delivery. Matryoshka doesn't speak but she's actually very eloquent. So the Matryoshka dolls, here is one doll, and the second Matryoshka doll, and a third. This will take a moment here. And a fourth, this is the fourth Matryoshka doll. And we have a fifth Matryoshka doll. Notice how beautifully these are hand painted. This is especially beautiful one. And the sixth Matryoshka doll. And they're all getting smaller and smaller. And the seventh Matryoshka doll. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. And the eighth, Matryoshka doll. I'll hold it up for you to see. And finally, the one that's hard to see, the ninth. These are the nine Matryoshka dolls, and what Matryoshka teaches us is that this is this idea. The small idea and then around that idea we have to build financing, money, human resources, marketing, distribution, channels, production, quality assurance. All of those things that make an idea into a full-blown product. And there's one more thing that Matryoshka will teach us before we end this brief introduction. On the table in front of me, there are nine Matryoshka dolls. For years, I taught that Matryoshka was nine nested dolls. Until a curious student came up and said Professor, why nine? Why nine? Why not ten? I said, I don't know nobody ever asked that before, and I've been teaching this for years and Matryoshka's been travelling with me for years and years. And so we took the ninth little Matryoshka doll. And lo and behold, there is a tenth Matryoshka doll. And here she is. And you can barely see her in my fingers, as I hold her up. Can you see that? The tenth matryoshka doll. And there's a lesson here. The lesson of curiosity, and asking questions, why? And really, really seeing things, which is a crucial part of creativity. Part one: Discovering ideas. What are our objectives? Before you start any project, you always ask, how will we know, at the end of it, if we've succeeded? Here are the six objectives that we have, I think, for our course together. Understand our method, the Zoom in/Zoom out/Zoom in method for developing ideas. Learn some exercises that we can do to strengthen our creativity and practice this, this method. Study cases of people and ideas that have changed the world with creativity. Learn about some research about creativity. Is creativity related to intelligence? Is it determined by our genes, what? Practice applying ZiZoZi to pressing social needs, and above all, take the energy of your creativity and your passion, and apply it to every facet of your life and your work. Starting now, put your creativity to work to change your lives starting now. We have some reading. This is optional reading. I hope you will, if you like, read our book, cracking the creativity code by my friend, colleague and coauthor and former student, Auria Rotenburg, zoom out, zoom in zoom out, framework for more creativity, fun and success. I'd just like to mention one of the words in this subtitle. The fun word. In business school we don't use that word very much. We talk about profit. But life is meant to be enjoyed and one of the main reasons to re-energize your creativity, is simply because it's more fun to do new things than to do the same old things all the time. I can also recommend another textbook that I've written together with a colleague in India, Professor Sashadri, on innovation management. This is a large, thick textbook that has more tool about how to implement ideas. But that will be mostly relevant for part two, delivering ideas. So a word about the instructors. Myself, Shlomo Maital. I've been teaching innovation for over 45 years, born in Canada, spent my career in Israel, taught for many summers at MIT and finally, have gotten around to doing a startup together with my former student and friend, Arie Rothenberg. Arie started Israel's largest advertising agency, and advertising agencies are built on creativity. When I started to write by book on creativity I hunted up Arie and together we wrote the book. I was very passionate about having someone who had actually implemented creativity. And used it to change the world. And I'll be on camera in front of you but Arie together with me has built this course. We're going to challenge you to, to meet seven unmet needs that we've identified in the world. We're going to ask you to choose one of these, and to tackle them using the tools we teach. Create a new kind of restaurant. Or find a way to bring the Internet to more than half the world who currently lack it. Find a way to save lives because in many parts of the developing world, people use cooking fires indoors and they inhale the smoke and that causes them respiratory illnesses. 1.3 billion people in the world have no access to electricity. Half the world's children go to schools that have no electricity. Imagine that. Can you find a way to bring electricity to the part of the world that doesn't have it. This is a seemingly small but really painful problem. People forget babies and small children in locked cars, and they die of overheating, hypothermia, and asphyxiation. Can you find a way, a clever way to prevent this from happening in cars. Beverages. Can you develop a new, healthy, tasty, popular beverage? But not in these plastic bottles that create environmental problems, in an eco-friendly package? We use 60 million plastic water bottles in America alone, in a year. How can we prevent that? And the last challenge, and this has a choice. Can you find a way to foster creativity in elementary and secondary schools while improving basic skills and knowledge and math, reading, and science? So, we need to know the basic things that other people have discovered, but we also need to stimulate children to develop their own knowledge, their own approaches, their own ideas. And schools are really really bad at that right now. Or an alternate part of the seventh challenge. Can you find a practical way to recycle food to feed the hungry? One estimate says that we waste a third to a half of the food that we produce in the world. Through wastage, rotting, discarding, mice, animals, and so on. Can you find a way to get some of this unused food to the hungry people who really, really need it and want it? So, to end our brief introduction, creativity is not just in our genes. It is an acquired skill and it improves with practice. And you can reignite your creative powers by practicing and using them. We're going to teach you a method for doing that in our coming four weeks together in this course. So please join us and a quick overview of week one we're going to talk about the definition of creativity, widening the range of choices. A quick overview, a quick glimpse at ZiZoZi method. We're going to give you a self test for your creativity on our website. We're going to test your discovery and delivery skills, talk about the imagination elevator, the ZizoZi framework and action, defining it, bringing stories about it and some creativity exercises and then a preview of next week's session. So, that ends our session, our introductory session and we'll move on now to week one, which is about what is creativity, how do we define it?
