by John Brooker | Mar 26, 2012 | Collaborate, Develop Opportunities, Facilitate meetings, Innovate
If you take a risk and run a creative workshop it can pay dividends… “Can you imagine, they asked me to do an extra session so we could do the “Disney Technique!” Open University MBA Student . The excited quotation above is from a student (we’ll call her Inga) who attended my MBA – Creativity and Innovation Workshop. In this case, Inga achieved more than just running her own workshop, but more of that later. Let me tell you first what she did. As part of a course assignment, Inga chose to produce some new concepts for an existing product in her company. She was rather nervous about facilitating a workshop but decided to use the creative and facilitation techniques she had experienced during our workshop. Here’s a summary of what Inga did: Session 1 She took a small group (four people including her) to the park to run the workshop: On the way, each person had three minutes to speak uninterrupted about the customers for the product and their lifestyle In the park, they summarised their points on paper They reviewed key points about the original product concept and added a few more They reviewed material on what makes a concept successful in their company, prior to identifying new concepts They looked at key consumer trends for 2009, using material gained previously from the Internet They looked at benefits to the consumer, splitting them into rational and emotional benefits. At this point, they wanted to know why these benefits were important but ran out of time so stopped for further review. This session lasted just an hour. One...