creativity, innovation and opportunity recognition - andy penaluna

Andy Penaluna - EEUKAndy Penaluna - EEUK

Inspiring Enterprise Inspiring Enterprise Conference 2011:Conference 2011:

Creativity, Innovation and Opportunity Recognition: experiences and approaches for enterprise education

What is education about?

So if we started again, with a school of enterprise, what would that be about?

Do the maths?

Enterprise and Entrepreneurship minus

Innovation and Creativity = ?

Investment

Search – Select – Implement – Capture

Ideas assessment gate

Development gate

Test gate

Launch

Innovation gates (based on Toyota)

Capture and profit

IdeaIdea

IdeaIdea

Idea

Idea

Idea

Idea

Idea

What is the difference between learning about entrepreneurship and learning for entrepreneurship?

What assessment implications might this have and what do we measure?

…or evaluate?

..or test?

National Enterprise Context?

Enterprise education requires educators to have the ability to develop their student’s creativity, innovation, problem solving and business acumen in addition to developing attributes like the capacity to cope with uncertainty, ambiguity and risk. While many of these are felt to be generic employability skills and attributes; enterprise education applies and develops these in situations and contexts that can lead to the students developing their individual entrepreneurial capabilities.

Enterprise Educators UK manifesto for the new government of the UK

National Entrepreneurship Concept?

Learning to use the skills, knowledge and personal attributes needed to apply creative ideas and innovations to practical situations. These include initiative, independence, creativity, problem solving, identifying and working on opportunities.

(Hannon and Rae, 2010)

So… define creativity

Lets get clear on a few things

Now… define innovation

Now try… opportunity recognition

Where are the overlaps and where are the distinctions?

Why do we assess our students?

Lets get clear on a few things

What do we assess and how?

What is the difference between evaluative (formative) assessment and grading or measurement (summative) assessment?

Where are the overlaps and where are the distinctions?

Where are the gaps? What’s missing?

An extension of problem-based learning – ‘Curiosity-based learning’

So what’s this approach about?

It relies on the educator defining problems and setting contexts

Is it student oriented learning? Challenging?

What are the disadvantages of this strategy?

Einstein famously stated that developing the right questions is considerably harder than answering them!

So what’s this approach about?

Entrepreneurship educators need to ask the right questions – that is the innovation that leads to enterprise and entrepreneurship, not enterprise is a prerequisite to innovation (NCGE)

The bigger picture?

We are in a three act drama - 150 years so far in the industrial age.

1 – Industrial, needs physically strong and dependable people

2 – Information, knowledge is power and he or she who ‘knows’ more will get on

3 – Conceptual, knowledge is available easily – how can we make sense of it?

(Pink 2008)

The bigger picture?

So question ‘making’ becomes a key pedagogical tool in PBL approaches

1 – Industrial, needs physically strong and dependable people

2 – Information, knowledge is power and he or she who ‘knows’ more will get on

3 – Conceptual, knowledge is available easily – how can we make sense of it?

(Pink 2008)

© 2007 ‘Dai’ Rees – Swansea Metropolitan University Alumni

1999… our big question… an idea?

Are we Cooks or Chefs?

Who do you look to for business expertise?

Business Modules developed by business schools have been seen to be inappropriate to the creative curriculum (dcms, May 2006, 20)

What about business modules developed by ‘creatives’ for the business school? Who has tried that? (Penaluna & Penaluna, 2005)

Typical ‘warm up’activity

In the next 3 minutes, write down as many uses for a metal coat hanger that you can think of

In the next 3 minutes, write down as many things as you can that you cannot do with a metal coat hanger

Warm up

How did you visualize your metal coat hanger?

Warm up – google metal coat hanger =

Google results for metal coat hanger

Make words work for you

Write as many short sentences as you can that includes the following words:

Pressure

Failure

Creativity

Bisociation

• ‘…can be a puzzle, until you ‘get it’!

KILLS BUGS FAST

Experience led to…

Biggest burgers campaign

Forced Divergent thinking - tasks

Visualize a kitchen, you are about to make a meal

But Dr Who has been around and you now have three hands

Task – list what will you redesign in your kitchen to take advantage of this new opportunity

Strategy and approach

• ‘Bisociation’ - combining two unrelated pieces of information to form a third idea…

• The point is that you are not just telling somebody something

• The person has just worked something out for themselves – which is intrinsically more motivational and offers a ‘feel good feeling’ in relation to the discovery… it directly affects behaviour change.

Creative capacity – tests

• Ideational Fluency – How many ideas can you get (coat hanger)

• Expressional Fluency – How many connections can you make (Pressure, Failure, Creativity or Doughnut, speed, value)

• Divergent Production – How broad and diverse can your solutions be? (3 hand Kitchen – a context for Ideational and Expressional fluency)

‘It is hard to imagine a time when the challenges we face so vastly exceeded the creative resources we have brought to bear on them’

‘aspiring innovators may have attended a ‘brainstorming’ session or learned a few gimmicks and tricks… rarely do these temporary place holders make it to the outside world’

IDEO’s Tim Brown thinks…(has arguably won more awards for innovation than any one else in the world)

Key observations?

Gerald Zaltman, a professor at Harvard Business School, is also a Fellow of the University’s Interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, Behaviour Initiative… artificial categorizations between disciplines “do not reflect how people actually live their lives”…“the most promising knowledge frontiers typically exist at the boundaries between fields rather than at the fields’ respective cores” (Zaltman, 2003, xii).

Enterprise can make a difference between a degree course that you find challenging, interesting but hard to apply in practice, to one which provides you with personal challenges, growth in confidence and the ability to transform your ideas into realities - particularly in the world of work.

Dhaliwal, Penaluna & Rae, Jan 2011, Graduate Market Trends

Overall aim – student stakeholders?

Pause for thought

Pause for thought

Quick exercises – What do you really ‘know’?

In small groups, respond to the question set out below.

Turn over the paper in the middle of the table and keeping your discussion as confidential as possible, write a ‘visual’ description of the animal – imagine that you were describing it to someone who had never seen one before… without any reference to sound.

Visual thinking - beyond the obvious

Why is the US rail system 4’ 8 I/2” wide?

So why is the British rail system 4’ 8 I/2” wide?

Ask interesting questions…

For example… “Why do we always do it that way?”

So why were chariot’s wheels that wide?

Ask interesting questions…“Why do we always do it that way?”

Conclusion 4’ 8 I/2” wide = 2 horses rears

Ask interesting questions…“Why do we always do it that way?”

The space shuttle is arguably the most advanced transport system in the world

So why couldn’t they build the Solid Booster Rockets the way they originally designed them?

Ask interesting questions…“Why do we always do it that way?”

Conclusion?“Why do we always do it that way?”

Conclusion?Question why do we always do it that way!

Themes covered today

• Connectivity How we make connections and how we can mentor (but not teach) creativity

• VisualisationHow we can visualise and locate creative thinking in the context of business needs

…not the type of enterprise that is often synonymous with "third stream" activities but one that is borne out of high-quality delivery and outcomes supported by significant cultural change.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/may/19/positioning-universities-distinctiveness?INTCMP=SRCH

Distinctiveness strategies formed on this basis move beyond business-facing paradigms. In this new vision, enterprise in teaching, research and third-mission activities become part of what you do to achieve exceptional outcomes, not the story of what you are.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2011/may/19/positioning-universities-distinctiveness?INTCMP=SRCH

Andy Penaluna - EEUKAndy Penaluna - EEUK

Inspiring Enterprise Inspiring Enterprise Conference 2011:Conference 2011:

Creativity, Innovation and Opportunity Recognition: experiences and approaches for enterprise education