Assessing the Class

So I sat down to finish the Class Assessment document tonight. Some of the questions were straightforward enough to answer – what did each of the creative techniques consist of, and how did we apply it to our project? – but others gave me pause. When I reached the questions about limitation on human learning and creativity, I had to stop and look back at the class as a whole while still boiling the results down to a sentence or two each. I don't know about the rest of you, but I found that to be a challenge.

Defining the limits wasn't difficult, but it also wasn't the task at hand: instead, I had to take both what I'd learned about the limitation and (at least as I understood the question) what I'd learned about how to transcend it and boil that down to a single line. For all except the first question, I found that to be daunting. To get it done, I eventually found myself working through an abbreviated version of the 6 hats exercise… you could call it the "two hats," since I was a Blue Hat by default and only approached the questions of 'what facts do I have about these limits?' and 'what are the pitfalls of these limits?' – with pitfalls here being the things that might negate them. Matching up an aspect of a limit with its 'pitfall' gave me an insight into how I thought about it and how my thinking had changed as a result of the class, and that I could turn into a sentence. For limits to cognition, a fact about it – 'I can only concentrate on one problem at a time' – and its pitfall/solution – 'multiple people working on the problem' – led me to the core concept and takeaway for me: that no innovation happens in a vacuum, and that real successes incorporate the contributions of many people (even if some of them aren't actively working on this particular product.)

The 'models of innovation' section also required me to stretch my thinking a bit, as the vast majority of the class focus, as you'd expect from an entrepreneurship course, was on new businesses and business models. By phrasing the question as 'how might you use this in your professional work,' the form made me reassess the tools we've been working on in a new light: where exactly could I take these and apply them in my existing environment? I'm not sure about how that question fell out for the rest of you, or even if you read it in the same way, but for me the fifteen minutes I spent on that section was some of the most immediately-valuable time of the summer. I've played with the possibilities a bit already in one of my creative exercises in isolation, but thinking about how the entire innovation process can be transferred into a fairly traditional environment was an eye-opener for me.