Mr. Laurynas Braškus, Innovation manager-consultant from ‘Sunrise Valley Science and Technology Park‘ gave the interactive and hands-on lecture training for students of the subject “Design Thinking for Start-ups” (liet. – “Startuolių kūrimas”). The topic of the lecture included idea generation methods and tools for design thinking. The lecture was moderated by Lidija Kraujalienė, lecturer at the Department of Business Technologies and Entrepreneurship (The Faculty of Business Management).
This lecture was organized at “VGTU LinkMenų fabrikas“, where creative infrastructure is already designed for students, academics and business.
Innovation expert had explained how the brains operate and the ways human employs creativity to work. Interesting facts done by NASA research were that 98% of children have creative solutions for the problems. After 10 years later the same children while being at high-schools had been tested again and the findings were shocking – it has dropped all the way down to just 12%. Importantly to prove the trend the same study was conducted with adults and only 2% of the adults have used creativity for finding solutions to the problems. We are innately born with the potential of a creative genius, but the moment we enter the school and high school system, we get dramatically dumbed down. So, the human act for non-creative behavior is unfortunately learned.
How to get the creative result of finding solutions and what actors should be included to improve the creative process? The main ingredients needed for creative solutions are the ‚creator‘, the ‚process‘ and the ‚environment‘. The ‚creators‘ thinking ‚outside the box‘ are highly recommended. Nevertheless, the professionally managed process for solving problems creatively in the group of people is the next factor of the success. Therefore Mr. Laurynas suggests always be in the new and creative space and not to avoid the working places further away from the work, family or other responsibilities. Being outside those everyday duties helps to push creativity engine inside people (employees). New environment or travel stimulates new ideas too.
There were presented 2 different thinking strategies convergent and divergent, so called vertical and lateral thinking. The Design thinking method includes both thinking processes and students had the possibility to be familiar with “design-thinking” process and method trough workshop session. It helps for start-ups trough to generate solution based ideas through problem solving principle, prototyping and testing phases. Design thinking stages are used to:
- Empathize – understanding the human needs involved,
- Define – re-framing and defining the problem in human-centric ways,
- Ideate – creating as many ideas as possible during the ideation sessions,
- Prototype – adopting a hands-on approach, and
- Final test – developed final solution to the defined problem.
Before you ever going to choose the problem definition to generate new ideas, we have to understand the problem by doing deep analysis of surrounding environment. Students have had to work on proposed “Novel use of table” problem in teams and finally had short presentations of their ideas for potential customers and have got the feedback from them for improving their ideas further.
Mr. Laurynas had proposed to think and use the creativity as a part of a personal skill. “It always seems impossible until it‘s done“, – Nelson Mandela.
Galerija
