Overview
"People think that it’s about producing things, they think of plays, films, paintings, but actually creativity is more about the process. It is about questioning, disrupting and improving on what has come before."
Dr Allègre Hadida, Academic Programme Director
The creation of new and useful ideas by teams or individuals at all levels of an organisation can create change, and this creativity can result in innovation. Ideas can be nurtured and enhanced through practical concepts, frameworks and tools. If we consider that 60 per cent of top executives worldwide name 'creativity' as their top priority (Capitalizing on Complexity, IBM, 2010), whilst 78 per cent of UK businesses recognise 'innovation' as vital to their survival and success (Everyday Innovation, NESTA, 2009) then it is not a surprise that 'Creativity is strongly correlated with superior business performance' (Brodherson et al, Digital McKinsey, 2017).
The Cambridge Creativity Lab is an intensive two-day experience focused on stimulating personal and collective creativity and on better understanding the importance and relevance of creativity in business. This practical, hands-on workshop is designed as an intensive introduction to creativity and its practical range of application within a business context and beyond. It addresses prejudices about creativity (such as, "I'm really not creative", "creativity cannot be taught", "we don't have time to think creatively", etc.), and introduces, discusses, and puts into practice concepts, models, frameworks, methods and tools of creativity to help participants address live real-world business challenges in a resourceful and inventive way.
The learning experience within the Cambridge Creativity Lab is designed to be inspiring, stimulating and disruptive, and culminates in the "creative-hack-a-thon", a creative pitch competition with presentations delivered to the programme facilitators and leading associates of Cambridge Judge Business School.
Topics
- What is creativity in business? The importance and relevance of creativity in business and how ideas can create change that leads to innovation.
- Experimenting with and valuing your own creative skillset and potential allowing you to assess how you can add value in a resourceful and inventive way
- Best practices for stimulating creativity at individual, team and organisational level in order to achieve organisational goals
- Stimuli and obstacles to individual, team and organisational creativity – debunk the myths
- Concepts, models, frameworks, methods and tools to manage business endeavours creatively
In addition attendees will work on at least three creative briefs (including the creative hack-a-thon brief) which contains the following potential business scenarios:
- New product launch
- Low budget activation for the charity/NGO sector
- Reaction to a PR crisis
- New service ideation
- Business transformation for an industry in decline
- Organisation transformation in a FTSE 100 company
Benefits
The Cambridge Creativity Lab aims to provide a fresh perspective to a management approach that lies outside the traditional business school curriculum. It transcends common notions of creativity to develop a hands-on approach to stimulating ideas in business that establishes it as a core ingredient for innovation, success and above-average performance across sectors and industries and in all walks of life. It aims to allow businesses to be achieve business goals through the innovation process, by providing mechanisms for implementing change, ideas and flexibility.
The Cambridge Creativity Lab will:
- Provide you with a hands-on experience of creativity and how to promote new ideas in your organisation
- Encourage you to experiment with creativity in a safe environment in order to understand the tools and dynamics required to bring greater creativity to your organisation
- Give you an opportunity to learn about your own creativity and that of your collaborators and organisation by observing your own behaviours and reflecting on those around you in action
- Give you the tool and skills to understand how to capture new ideas and seek out challenges in order to both broaden your knowledge and skills, and manage your surroundings
- Allow you to develop your creative leadership skills
- Provide the frameworks to design a creative culture within your organisation
Who should attend
The production of new and useful ideas by individuals or teams can appear in many forms and across all functions within firms of all kinds - from entrepreneurial start-ups to well-established enterprises. This programme is aimed at managers and senior-managers who are not from a creative background but instead are looking to define and formalise a process for developing creativity and ideas within their team, department or business. Hands-on experience of creativity is not a prerequisite equally those wishing to refresh their understanding of creativity and how it fits into the innovation process will benefit from attending.
The Cambridge Creativity Lab is a dynamic programme combining lectures, discussions, hands-on exercises, and a live creativity challenge. Participants will work in teams, and will be expected to spend time in the evening preparing for the following day to complete a creativity challenge. Teams will need to manage workload, face-to-face meetings and outputs between the first and second day of the workshop.
