Skill at discovering new ideas, and delivering them, may be one of the most important practical job skills, in today’s and tomorrow’s job market. Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. This course aims to empower individuals who believe they have lost their innate creativity, because they, their employers or teachers prefer the three R's: replication, repetition and rote, to innovation. We show how to re-ignite rusty creative powers. During this course, you will learn proven tools, frameworks and concepts useful for discovery– generating an endless stream of new ideas implementing at least some of those ideas with skill and persistence, based on books and articles written by the instructors. In the first part of the course, you will learn a proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’ that makes creativity more accessible to everyone. In the following weeks, you will learn practical proven tools useful for delivering ideas by employing the basic principles of business and management. You will practice the method, use it to tackle challenging real-world needs and produce a 2-3 minutes video presenting your idea. Course Learning Outcomes On successfully completing this four-week course, you will be able to: - Manage a process to generate an unending stream of creative ideas - Lead a process of innovation and implement ideas through all phases from discovery to delivery. - Apply creativity to a wide range of strategic management issues. - Solve problems with a high degree of innovation, creative thinking and risk taking. - Use and apply proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’. - Develop and implement an innovation in your own practice. - Identify new and unfamiliar challenges and reflect on these challenges from a creative point of view, action they require and service they provide. - Demonstrate creative problem solving skills for defining, structuring and solving real world operations management problems.
Summary of Week One; Preview of Week Two
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From the course by Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Cracking the Creativity Code: Discovering Ideas
191 ratings
Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
191 ratings
Course 1 of 4 in the Specialization Startup Entrepreneurship
From the lesson
What is Creativity?
Meet the Instructors
Prof. (Emeritus) Shlomo MaitalProf. Shlomo Maital Sr. Research Fellow, S. Neaman Institute, Technion
Industrial Engineering
Welcome back. This is Session 10,
the last session of our first week together.
We'll wrap up our first week, and
then I'll give you a preview of what we're going to discuss in week two.
Let's talk about Salvador Dali.
Who kind of captures the theme, of our first week together.
Salvador Dali was a famous painter, a Spanish surrealist painter.
He was born in Figueres, Spain in 1904.
He lived for 85 years, almost.
Died in 1989.
And painted many wonderful paintings.
On your screen you can see, one of them.
His famous painting of the flexible pocket watches,
that kind of were flexible, and bend over fences, for example.
What did we learn from Salvador Dali?
We learn about one of the many paradoxes of creativity.
Creativity is kind of a combination of Confucius, and rebellion.
I sometimes teach in China, and
I often refer to this issue of Confucius, the issue of mastery.
Confucius was an educator, a powerful influence on China.
And he taught that people must learn with respect,
from people who have wisdom, from older people, from their teachers.
And they must achieve mastery.
And they do that by listening carefully, and respectfully, to teachers.
So, one part of creativity is acquiring knowledge that exists already,
and mastering something.
Mastery.
But Confucius alone, mastering old things, doesn't always lead to new things.
You need the mastery of Confucius, and old knowledge.
And the rebellious spirit, the creative spirit,
the iconoclasm of the innovator, the creative person.
This is embodied by Dali.
Dali was a wild innovator in the things he painted, and
some of his images are striking, and weird, and wonderful.
But if you look closely at his painting, he's a skilled classical painter.
His technique is flawless, with shadow, and coloring.
So, Dali mastered the art of painting, and
achieved mastery, and combined that mastery with
fierce eccentric rebellion, in what he painted.
These two things don't always go together.
The discipline of mastery, and the rebellion of creative iconoclast.
Do you have that?
Do you have the ability, the discipline,
to master a field of knowledge like Dali did?
And then, used that knowledge in totally different ways,
to paint things that other people barely imagined.
And let's end with a rather strange story, that I really like.
Maybe it doesn't illustrate a lot, but maybe it does.
Well, some of you may have seen a movie called Cool Running.
1993 movie about the Jamaican Olympic Bobsled Team.
No, that's not a joke.
There was an Olympic Jamaican Bobsled Team.
There still is [LAUGH] a Jamaican Olympic Bobsled Team.
It's lead by a man named Winston Watts.
He's been to four Winter Olympics.
He comes from Jamaica.
Not a lot of snow in Jamaica, not an awful lot of bobsled courses.
But he assembled a team, and he had a dream to go to the olympics,
with his two man bobsled team.
And they appeared in the Winter Olympics, and they've appeared in 2002,
1994, 1998, and they were in Sochi.
The latest winter Olympics and they used something called crowdfunding,
to raise money to get them to the latest winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.
So what's the point here about creativity?
Take a wild idea, bringing a bobsled team from Jamaica,
Jamaica's a pretty warm country, in the Caribbean, people go there for
the sunshine and the warmth, not for the snow.
Take a wild idea, decide that you want to take a bobsled team to the winter olympics
on behalf of Jamaica and carry the Jamaican flag.
And then find a way to make it happen, find a place to train, raise money.
It's not cheap to fly bobsleds all the way over to
the Olympics wherever its being held.
Take your idea, wild as it may seem,
communicate it to others, excite the others with that idea.
Get people on board, raise the resources and make it happen.
Kind of the essence of creativity.
So we end by citing someone wiser than I, a man named Louis Mobley.
Louis Mobley worked for IBM.
At IBM many years ago, almost 60 years ago,
he developed six principles for greater creativity and
these were used at IBM and IBM is and was a very creative organization.
The first principle that he cited was that traditional teaching methods For
teaching creativity are worse than useless.
If you want to teach creativity, you have to try to be creative and that's in fact,
what we're trying to do in this course.
Becoming creative requires unlearning.
To some degree, in these factory schools that we all go to, where we're taught
there's only one way to do thing, and you have to do things the way it always been
done, So to be creative you have to unlearn all of the stuff we have been
taught by our teachers about only one way and learn that there are many ways.
You don't really learn to be creative.
I'm trying to teach a course on creativity.
But in fact, I'm stressing here that in order to become creative,
we've just talked about.
Creativity exercises.
You become creative by action.
By doing things.
And one of the best ways to become creative according to Mobley, and I agree,
you transform yourself by hanging out with creative people.
If you're amongst creative people you eventually will become creative too.
It's a virus, it is catching.
So try to put yourself in environments that have a lot,
a lot of creative people in them.
Creativity is correlated with self-knowledge and self-awareness.
So our Zoom Out journey begins with a Zoom In journey inside ourselves,
knowing who we are, what we really want, what we're passionate about.
Cause creativity is driven by motivation.
Motivation is driven by understanding what matters to us and
what is it that we really, really would like to change.
Creativity is risky.
Creative people give themselves permission to be wrong, to make mistakes and to fail.
You must be forgiving with yourself because very often creativity,
creative ideas don't work at least not initially.
So those are Mobiles six points, and we again, and again,
and again remind ourselves of Carl Young's theme.
That human creativity has no limits,
except the limits that we place upon ourselves.
Let's also remind ourselves of Albert Einstein's famous dictum.
If you have a challenge or a problem and you limit yourself to
the same kind of thinking that was used to create that problem.
We'll never solve it.
You need a higher level of thinking than the thinking that created the problem.
If you stick to the same level, you'll simply perpetuate the problem.
You cannot solve a problem with the same level of thinking that created it.
Zoom out above the problem, above the challenge, and
then come back to zoom in with a whole new way of approaching the problem.
Head in the clouds, feet on the ground.
That's the image I'd like you to take away from week one.
Wild imagination, head in the clouds, The 989th floor of the imagination elevator.
Come back down to ground.
Make our ideas practical.
Implement them.
Head in the clouds thinking and feet on the ground.
My friends, that concludes our first week together, and
I'll give you a brief preview of Week two.Week two again,
is about the zoom in zoom out method.
We'll look at a very interesting case study how Thomas Edison,
great inventor had 1,000 patents.
How he invented the light bulb and lit up America We'll talk about benchmarking.
How you do the zoom out in a systematic way.
How you challenge basic assumptions.
And we'll look at a method developed by perhaps the worlds greatest
organizational management consultant named Peter Drucker.
We'll talk about the tradeoff between discovery And delivery and
look at some interesting stories and case studies and
stress the point that creativity is about creating new ideas,
innovating every where all the time with everybody and with everything that we do.
So, we end with a little bit of personal homework.
Look ahead to the next 30 years.
2015 to 2044.
Write your own personal story.
I've told you some stories.
What's your story?
Write your own personal story as if it's 30 years from now.
You're kind of dozed off and you wake up and it's 2045,
in 2045 you worked for 30 years as a creative individual, what have you done?
How have you changed the world?
Whose lives have you changed?
Whose lives have you improved and enriched and And lengthened, perhaps.
And remember Kenneth Robinson's dictum, that what we do for
ourselves leaves the world with us when we leave the world.
What you do for others lasts and lasts and lasts forever.
Concluding, so I thought I would conclude in an unconventional way with a song.
I don't have the music for the song but these are the words to the song.
And they're sung by a wonderful Argentinian singer named Mercedes Sosa.
And the song is called "Gracias A La Vida", Thank You For Life.
And the reason I u, use this song to conclude week one with you is that,
my friends, creativity is a divine gift.
It's a gift that human beings have and that other animals,
even primates Do not have and when your given a gift your almost obligated to use
it especially a divine gift we're given the gift of life we're given the gift
of creativity in our lives and we can enrich our own lives and other people's
lives by using our creativity Thanks to the life that has given me so much.
Strength to my tired feet, with them I walked cities and puddles, beaches and
deserts, mountains and plains.
In your house, your street, and your courtyard.
Thanks to the life that has given me so much, gave my beating heart,
when I look at the fruit of the human brain.
When I look at the good so far from the bad.
You look inside your clear eyes thanks to the life that has given me so much,
gave the laughter to the crying, so
I can distinguish happiness from sadness, both materials that form my song,
and your song that is mine too, and the song of all which is my own song.
Thanks to the life that has given me so much.
This ends session one, week one session 10 of week one and
I look forward very much to seeing you for week two.
I'd like to ask you to please go to the website.
And please do the multiple choice quiz as part of the course requirements.
And I look forward to seeing you in our seconds together in week two.
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