MARCH 26, 2006
B-SCHOOL NEWS
Creativity Comes to B-School |
As
more institutions set up courses stressing innovation, students are
learning all sorts of techniques to help them think outside the box |
Before you read this, take two minutes to draw a picture of your ideal
home as you would have drawn it as a 5- or 6-year-old. Do it quickly.
Don't think too hard. Just draw it.
That's one of the exercises that Jonathan Feinstein, a professor of economics at the Yale School of Management, assigns his students in the course, "The Practice and Management of Creativity and Innovation."
Feinstein, whose book, The Nature of Creative Development,
(2006, Stanford University Press) comes out in May, says that 9 out of
10 will come in with the same picture -- a square box with a triangular
peaked roof, four windows, and a door in the center. More often than
not, the similarities even extend to the semicircular sun with rays
extending from the right hand corner of the picture.
AD CAMPAIGNS. How does such an exercise
help to prepare future managers? For starters, Feinstein says his
course provides a setting for business-minded Type A's to think
differently, to challenge their own assumptions about how creative
people think, and then apply that thinking to their career.
The house drawing exercise demonstrates the age children are
when they develop their idea of home, and how similar that idea is
among people. Students then use the exercise to examine their
underlying views of advertising campaigns, business models -- even the
stock market -- and then attempt to see these things without the
stereotypes.
B-schools are working to get students to think outside the
business box. Professors say it helps people enhance their own personal
creativity, as well as their management of others', because employers
in the new economy value innovative and creative thinking as much as
traditional frameworks and skills.
'IT'S NOT ENOUGH.' Innovation and
creativity courses were slow to catch on but have spread like wildfire.
Only 29% of MBA and EMBA programs have freestanding courses in
creativity and innovation, according to a Kennesaw State University
study released in November, but the number of schools offering these
courses has doubled in the past five years, and nearly 92% of those
that did not have a course or module said they were at least somewhat
likely to offer one in the next five years.
Clearly, schools are trying to keep up with the real world.
The best job candidates in the future will possess a creative ability
that comes from working with different kinds of people on challenging
projects, says Bob Sutton, professor of engineering at Stanford and
author of the book, Weird Ideas that Work (Simon & Schuster, 2002). "If you just have an MBA, that's nice, but it's not enough," he argues.
ARTISTS WELCOME. There is research
suggesting increased reliance on creatively stimulated growth among
leaders. Nearly three-quarters of executives surveyed by Boston
Consulting Group in their 2005 innovation survey said their companies
will increase spending on innovation, up from 64% in 2004. Almost 90%
of the execs surveyed said that generating organic growth through
innovation has become essential for success in their industry
Once associated with laziness or nonconformity, creativity in
business today is all about differentiating a product or company.
"Every brand has two or three competitors, so it's now a required skill
to make sure you stand out and and stand for something," says Marcio
Moreira, vice-chairman for global professional management for McCann
Worldgroup, a marketing communications company.
Because it's something he looks for in employees, says
Moreira, who manages much of the hiring for his global advertising
company, he thinks every MBA program should have creativity as a
required part of the coursework. Moreira points to his company's
development of Mastercard's "priceless" campaign as a great example of
creativity at work in business.
GAME GURU. At Yale, Feinstein uses
historical figures and life stories to shed light on the creative
process that contributed to such groundbreaking research as Einstein's
theory of relativity. Feinstein teaches students about authors like
Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, as well as artist Alexander
Calder, to demonstrate that the creative process is just that -- a
process just as accessible to them as to anyone else.
Instead of examining historical figures, marketing Professor Yoram Wind from the Wharton School
at the University of Pennsylvania , turns to today's creative leaders
-- from architects Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to game designer
and Sony Online Entertainment CCO Raph Koster.
Hearing from such impressive speakers reinforces the
importance of the unstructured problems that all managers face. "When
we look at leaders, they all have a high level of tolerance for
ambiguity," says Nina Godiwala, a second-year student in the course. "A
lot of MBA students are not very good at that."
COMIC BOOKS. Sometimes, students need to
get outside the classroom to think outside the box. B-school students
in Professor Jim Patell's "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme
Affordability" course at Stanford head to places like Burma to examine
farming and irrigation methods in rural areas.
Business students are put in teams with engineers, designers,
education students, computer scientists, even literature students, to
confront a major problem in the developing world. Then they design and
build working prototypes to attempt to correct it. The course's first
offering resulted in the creation of a company called Cosmos Ignite Innovations that produces low-cost lighting systems for developing countries.
Patell says the most important component of the course is learning that
it's O.K. to fail. "If you don't get something the first nine times,
then you're encouraged to get it on the tenth, because this is school,"
he says. "We're not expected to solve these problems."
Learning to see things from different perspectives often requires interacting with a mix of people. On Mar. 21, MIT Sloan School of Business
and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (SMFA) hosted
"Twenty-First Century Visual Arts for Business Leaders," an intensive,
one-day workshop that paired 12 Sloan students with master of fine arts
students from the museum school. There were three components: digital
animation, digital comic book storyboarding, and color.
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS. As if drawing a
cartoon storyboard wasn't different enough, MFA students gave the
B-schoolers a twist. Students were divided into teams of two. Starting
at opposite ends of the storyboard, one team drew the first panel and
the other drew the last without looking at what the others had done.
Each time they completed a box, the teams switched positions, so that
they never got to draw two pictures in a row.
The challenge was to create a coherent narrative that worked
from beginning to end while escaping their linear thinking patterns.
"My team drew a yogi meditating on a mountain, and the other team drew
a bunch of fish jumping out of an airplane," says Corey Halverson, a
second-year student at Sloan. "We needed to think hard about how to
connect those two panels."
Halverson says he will use lessons from the day's workshop in
his future career in television media. As companies seek more
innovative employees, MBAs who have learned techniques for cutting-edge
creative thinking might have an edge in the new economy.
Gangemi is a reporter with BusinessWeek Online in New York
Edited by Phil Mintz
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This is what the VCU Adcenter Creative Brand Management track has been about from day one. This is what it will be about through week 60 and for classes in the future.
MIT Sloan School of Business and the VCU Adcenter were the only schools who had two teams in the semi-finals (top ten) at the Innovation Challenge held at UVA's Darden School this past year. Darden was very unhappy when they had zero teams selected, even though they had entered the highest number of teams and were hosting the event.
Recent Comments