Managing Creativity for Innovation (HONR 1310) was an undergraduate honors course offered in Fall 2016 by the Northeastern University Honors Program taught by Anthony De Ritis, Professor of Music in the College of Arts, Media and Design.

In a freelance or ‘gig’ economy, successful workers will be flexible and inventive, quick to deliver services, products, or solutions on demand. Creativity will be their most valuable tool.

— “Robot-Proof: How Colleges Can Keep People Relevant in the Workplace” by Joseph E. Aoun, Chronicle of Higher Education, January 27, 2016

Course Objective

A reading of President Aoun’s statement above in the Chronicle suggests that in order to be meet the needs of a rapidly changing workforce, successful workers will need to be creative, and must be able to apply this creativity towards resolving problems, and delivering new products and services.

Similarly, at the 2011 leadership conference of the General Management Admission Council (GMAC), it was stated that:

Globally, leaders are calling on their people for more creativity and more innovation — and are calling upon the arts for inspiration… we are seeing increasing numbers of corporate leaders bringing artists and artistic processes into their companies.

The objective of this course is to experience methods and processes that foster creativity, with an emphasis on methods that draw upon the arts; to experiment with creativity; to reflect on the creative process; and to propose, track and complete significant group-based innovation projects that embrace design thinking and the creative processes experienced in the class.

This course will consist of two parts:

1. Introduction to the Design Thinking Innovation Process
2. Group-Based Projects

Part I of our course is an introduction to the innovation process known as “design thinking”, which has taken the business world by storm. (In September 2015, Forbes magazine announced that design thinking was the new core competency that all corporations should implement). Our primary reference will be: Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation by Tim Brown, currently CEO of the innovation consultancy IDEO, widely credited with founding the design thinking method. In addition, we will occasionally refer to an alternative approach offered by Bruce Nussbaum, author of Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire. Brown describes an iterative process of innovation in three parts: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. Nussbaum describes “five competencies of creative intelligence”: knowledge mining, framing, playing, making and pivoting.

In summary, Part I of our course includes: in class activities and field work, lectures on design and ethnography, a reading of the first four chapters of Change By Design by Tim Brown, references to Creative Intelligence by Bruce Nussbaum, and three small research projects. Part I of our course culminates in an in-class midterm exam.

Part II of our class is where we move from theory to practice, in the form of a group-based innovation projects. Here we harness what we learned from Part I. Each member of the class presents a one-minute video pitch of an inspirational idea they would like to submit to the design thinking process. The top vote getters will be selected, and the class will be divided in to three or four groups. The remainder of the class consists of each group working out their ideas within the design thinking process; which includes: project proposals consisting of an inspirational narrative, pain point, problem statement and constraints; a reflection on the creative process via a reading of Notes on Directing by Hauser and Reich; and four iterations of prototypes for each group’s innovation project.

The FINAL will be a presentation accompanied by “process books”, which capture the narratives of each groups’ ideas from their inception, through the iterations, twists, and turns that ideas will be subjected to, and towards implementation.

Learning Outcomes

Approaches to out of the box thinking; learning new methods of “perfect brainstorming” and shared creative experiences; improvisation as a means to stimulate innovation; embracing failure and experimentation during the ideation process; the benefits of rehearsal and practice for audience presentation; interdisciplinary study and methodology; learning to deal with performance anxiety; learning how to express oneself individually as a leader while simultaneously maintaining the role as a team member.

Readings

Books (Required)

Tim Brown, Change By Design: How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2009.

Frank Hauser and Russell Reich, Notes on Directing: 130 Lessons in Leadership from the Director’s Chair, Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York, 2003.

Books (Recommended)

Bruce Nussbaum, Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, 2013.