INNO9001 Innovative and Creative Thinking: Recognising Opportunities GE

• 3 x Full day intensive workshop immersions and
• 1 x full day application workshop

From the classroom to the boardroom, thought leaders are united in their call for creativity to be prioritised as a critical 21st century skill. Whether as an employee or employer, whether non-profit, small business or large corporation, creativity and innovation is critical to providing value and ensuring long-term survival. This topic focuses on creative thinking as a driver of organisational innovation and transformation and is designed to help all students better harness their full creative and innovative potential. Working on social and economic challenges, students learn how to apply contemporary theories and practices, such as Design Thinking, to identify and frame problems, articulate innovation challenges, generate, evaluate and evolve novel solutions and test these in the market. Students will shift both their perspectives and their behaviours as they experience creative thinking and innovation in group settings and go through the steps necessary to identify, research and, ultimately, develop multi-bottom-line solutions to problems worth solving.

This topic aims to develop in students an advanced capacity to ensure "problem-solution fit" for an opporunity or new venture. This requires that students develop the research and analytical skills to clearly define and articulate problems, including root cause, prior to investing time and effort building solutions. Students will undertake research, in particular empathy and ethnographic research, to develop insights and hypothses about problems, customers and stakeholders. Subsequently, using divergent thinking techniques and drawing on trend and environmental anlysis, students will converge on the solution that best "fits" the problem and continue to evolve it to maximise customer value, feasibilty and commercial viability. Culminating in a pitch to a panel of experts, this highly experiential topic embeds critical practical skills in students, enabling them to develop, assess and, ultimately, pitch their own team's innovative solution to a user or market problem or need.

1. Critically evaluate the concepts of creativity and innovation, the factors which affect an individual’s and an organisation’s creativity and the impact innovation can have on organisations and society
2. Identify and investigate critical problems that impact society in a significant way, using a range of creative problem solving techniques and tools
3. Adopt design thinking as an approach to creative problem solving and apply design thinking principles to generate, evaluate and improve innovative ideas
4. Develop research plans including primary and secondary research to gather information and generate insights about the identified problem
5. Use creative and divergent thinking tools to generate many plausible solutions to fit the identified problem
6. Evaluate and evolve solutions to maximise desirability, feasibility and viability, leveraging research and data for evidence