Work Day 2. Mar 20th

We started the innovation lecture at the Karen theatre at 8.30 sharp. People buzzing around, the atmosphere is full on innovation! Suddenly silence. The teacher uses an old trick of raising his hand, with everybody slowly following suit. Somehow this trick silences the whole room within seconds, whether this is some sort of conditioned response through years of being in the Finnish schooling system or just automatic due to getting cues from people around, well what ever it was defiantly worked! A new teacher introduced herself and began to have our innovative brains to open up via a physical sculpture activity. We were divided into pairs, sculptors and sculptees. We where to reposition the sculptees according to instructions given by the teacher. The funniest of which was to look like a ice hockey player! We then began to delve into different learning tools for innovation. We created an ‘idea tree’. Here the idea (no pun intended) is to create a tree with branches that each represent an idea in regards to our subject. Our group had the theme of ‘how to engage people offline via social media’. We where at first a bit dumbstruck how to continue, but the teachers encouraged us to always say ‘yes and’ and remove the words ‘no, but’ from our vocabulary. Suddenly ideas started to steamroll out. We created a branch wit ‘events’, ‘ competitions’, ‘offline/online engagement through writing replies online’ and different apps etc... 

We thought we did good coming up with about 10 different ideas, however the teacher reminded us that for the time we had we should of come up with over 130 different ideas! Better luck next time, we thought, but it gave us a good idea to increase our efforts in a positive manner J

 Then we switched to writing streaming for the purpose to generate diversified ideas. It’s more of throwing ideas inside the box and trying to figure out what kind of idea would be helpful and what could stimulate new ideas. It’s a process getting everyone inspired and let the process flowing nonstop. One of us was in charge to keep the record. Although this is a good way to keep thinking and make the ideation positive, there are some certain aspects that created bumps. Writing streaming lacked the feelings of involvement to cover all team members. That is what we recognized when we pondered back to rethink the whole process.

The third innovation tool that we tried was doodling. We all grabbed a pen and begin to draw and write random ideas on a paper while we discussed with the other team members. This way we came up with a lot of ideas and the though-chain seemed to be never ending. We think that this was a good tool to use, especially when you're in the need of something that'll keep your mind open and the ideas keep flowing. A disadvantage we noticed with this innovation tool was that it was easy to loose track of the subject as the thoughts wanders away from the subject.