My first university lecture
Yesterday I had the pleasure of carrying out a lecture at the University of National and World Economy in Sofia, Bulgaria. I was invited by an acquaintance of mine, who is a professor at the university in the Innovative Business Faculty. The lecture was developed for last year Bachelor students. Their knowledge about the Creative Platform was none, but now I hope I managed to give them the spark and interest them into using it.
I developed a small version of the Creative Platform workshop with the following phases from the 6-phase model (more on the 6-phase model you can read in my next “Behind the scene” article):
Red Carpet
Preparation
Idea Development
Professional Input
The first phase – the Red Carpet is the phase, in which the participants in the workshop are being welcomed and introduced to the concepts of the Creative Platform. In this phase we did my favorite 3D case – “Yes, we made a mistake”. At first the students were a bit confused – I got the question “Why do we cheer for our mistakes?”, well because we are encouraged to make as many mistakes as possible. Remember the rules we talked so much about in the previous articles? “Make as many mistakes as possible and use them constructively” – this is probably one of the most important rules of the Platform. It is essential for the participants to know that when a mistake is made, it will lead them to better ideas. using mistakes constructively gives the participants a better understanding of what to do and how to do it better.
Another 3D case that we did was “Cartoon Character”, where the participants chose their favorite cartoon character and explained it to the other person, next to him. Then we also used “Giving Presents” 3D case, before the presentations of the ideas they had generated.
Furthermore, the 3D cases are energizers, they have the aim to wake up the participants and give them the necessary push to be present and participate in the workshop. They are confusing at first, but they are the basis for the environment that the Creative Platform aims to create.
In the second phase – Preparation, I decided to give the students the option to choose the topic they want to work on out of 3 topics and make their own problem to solve. We had two groups – one of 8 people and the other of 7 people. The 3 topics were: movies of the century, being a foreigner and graduating university. The first group chose to work on the topic – graduating university, while the second group was working on the topic – being a foreigner.
This phase is normally the first phase for the workshop and it s carried out from the organizer, however, I thought it would be a better idea to let the students choose a topic they are passionate about, thus increasing their engagement.
The next phase is Idea Development. The students had an hour to generate an idea to solve the problem they chose to work on. I explained to them how to start and how they can use the stimuli cards, in order to generate better ideas. As an observer of the situation, this is by far the most interesting step of all. I could hear the discussions they had, the ideas and how those ideas were generated. It is, in my opinion, essential to feel comfortable, when trying to be creative. There were several students, who didn’t engage in the whole process, but that’s alright. I didn’t expect anyone to want to participate, but it seemed like they had an interest in the topics and the problems, because these problems were the ones they actually experience. Meaning, that in order to enforce engagement, motivation and commitment, you have to make sure that the problem is a problem to all participants. To make sure that they are affected by it, thus increasing the motives for them to work on a solution.
The last phase we went through is Professional Input – the students had 3 minutes to present first the problem, then the solution and sign their presentations with the cartoon characters from the second 3D case I gave them. We discussed both ideas afterwards. And here are the posters that the students created:
