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
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.