Teaching Creativity and Innovation - Phase I

How do you teach creativity? How do you teach innovation? At La Salle Business and Engineering School in Barcelona we've been experimenting with different methodologies, theories, and tools in an effort to inspire creativity in our students. We believe strongly in entrepreneurship here, and that creating a startup business is a viable alternative to working in a big company when students graduate, and even if you don't want to work in a startup, an entrepreneurial mindset is useful in any future endeavor. As part of the development of the entrepreneurial mindset, we have a 2nd-year undergraduate class called Creativity and Innovation. I'd like to explain some of the things we've been trying, and to share some of the results. The current Creativity and Innovation class has 3 phases. In the first phase, we give students the opportunity to experience the process of innovation with very little theory and tools - through learning by doing and trial and error, they have to find their own way. The project in groups of 3-5 students is to create a YouTube video on any topic that you think might go viral. The goal is to reach 10,000 views by the end of the semester.  The requirements are very basic: all students must appear in the video, and their should be some sort of surprise. The project is divided into 3 phases:

1. Ideation: teams research viral videos that have been successful in the past. They identify interesting niches, and brainstorm ideas for their own video. The main deliverables are a presentation in front of the class of their ideas in order to get feedback, and a storyboard showing the main scenes that will be filmed and the resource requirements for each scene.
2. Execution: students record the videos and create the first prototype, and present the prototype in class for feedback. If the goal is to be funny, is it really funny? Does the timing of the scenes work? Do people understand the message you're trying to get across. Based on this feedback the groups finish their videos.
3. Launch: once the final videos are complete, each team has about 2 months to get 10,000 views. They're responsible for identifying the description and keywords in YouTube, and for sharing their video on social networks, on blogs, basically anywhere they think it can get some traction and people will share it with their friends and their network. At the end of the semester, students present the final results and a "making of" video.

Here are the 2011 Creativity and Innovation Viral Videos, and the 2012 Creativity and Innovation Viral Videos (about a month left till the end of the semester). What do students learn from this experience? We've found several key messages that have come out of this exercise. First of all, all innovation efforts have to work within constraints. In this case, the main constraints are the time (strict deadlines), tools (although iMovie and other free tools help a lot), and other resources (people, space, weather) including all of the unpredictable delays and complications which affect the ability to execute on your vision, and finish by the deadline. Many groups end up deleting a number of scenes that were just too difficult or time-consuming to execute, or changing the idea completely. Next, good ideas are not enough for innovation. Working with startups, we often see teams who are reluctant to share an idea because it's so good that everyone will want to steal it. The message we try to get across is that the initial idea is worth very little without a good idea, good execution, and good promotion. In the case of the viral video project, several ideas are abandoned when the team realizes how difficult it is to execute, and others with a good idea and poor execution get poor final results. The same happens for good ideas with a good execution, but insufficient promotion in the launch phase in order to achieve customer adoption. We have seen videos where the initial idea did not seem that innovative necessarily, but a good execution and creative promotion efforts achieve great results. Ski Avalanche from last year's class is a great example of this. The group abandoned their first idea, and changed to the GoPro camera skiing footage, with no time for a storyboard and no prototype. But they did such a great job at execution and promotion that they achieved the most visits in the class. Some other conclusions include finding an audience and giving them what they want, play to your strengths (passion is contagious!), and learn from your mistakes - on the viral video project, so you get points for analyzing why something didn't work and how you would do it better next time. In other words, failure in this case is not from failing to achieve 10,000 views. We realize this is difficult (though clearly not impossible!) The biggest failure is not trying. In future posts, we'll discuss the other 2 phases in the course. In phase 2 we use case studies and hands-on exercises to share different tools and methodologies for creativity and innovation such as observation, visual thinking, user innovation, open innovation, blue ocean, adoption and diffusion, etc. In phase 3 student teams participate in a Company Innovation Project, where they choose a company that is struggling to compete (movie theatres, publishing, small businesses, etc.) and they propose innovative solutions to help them create their own Blue Ocean market. Through this final project, they apply the various tools and methods they've acquired in the first 2 phases. To conclude, let's just say that creativity and innovation aren't easy, and neither is teaching these key concepts. But through "learning by doing" approaches, we hope students will gain the confidence to try in the real world. And who knows? Some may just create the next Facebook, Google, or Privalia!