Open 2011

Frances Mitchell, Innovation Academy, University College Dublin, Ireland, frances.mitchell@ucd.ie

Required: Today’s newspaper for each student. At least five hours in the day to complete the task.

Optional: Open the presentation with a clip from the film “Working Girl” (part where Melanie Griffith spots opportunity in a newspaper to work with Trask Industries). A fun way to allow students to see how the newspaper is a valuable tool.

• Find an opportunity from today’s newspaper

• Form into multidisciplinary teams

• Create the most value possible from your chosen opportunity by using only what you have in your pockets/bag (document everything before leaving the room)
• Return at the end of the day and make a three-minute presentation on the value that you created (any medium)

 

Students can then literally do whatever they want to create anything of value (depending on how they qualify value). In some cases there is only the potential of future value (i.e., a project that cannot be fully completed in the time-scale), but certainly I would expect that a good amount of research into the idea has happened.

Any group of students. I have worked with multidisciplinary teams of PhD students (across all disciplines) and it worked extremely well. The aim is to get students to think beyond their area of expertise and see opportunities in everyday life. Ideally you would have multidisciplinary teams as it brings richer experience and skills to the table.

Repeatability: The newspaper is a constantly changing medium, therefore this activity can be repeated ad nauseam without any cross-over.

It genuinely gets students thinking of opportunities and has them referring to newspapers (and therefore the world outside their research) on a much more regular basis.

Low work investment from lecturer/facilitator

No need for facilities as they can only use what is on them at the time)

Time required to complete the assignment--ideally you give the students a full day.

You need to supply the newspapers (I arranged free newspapers from the Irish Times)

Usually helps if presenter has done it themselves and can present an example.

Could use the online version of a newspaper to supply "news" (though this may lead to students using the internet, which was not originally in their pocket)

Could be done by individuals, but the proviso being that they do something in an area that has nothing to do with their research (still much better if done in teams, as you share skill sets)

Jonathan Weaver and Darrell Kleinke

University of Detroit Mercy Mechanical Engineering Department weaverjm@udmercy.edu

DeBono’s fundamental premise is that there are six fundamental types of thinking, and thinking becomes too confusing if we try to think in all modes simultaneously. Thinking becomes more effective if we use one type of thinking at a time. This is accomplished by figuratively putting on “thinking caps,” one by one. If groups of people can think in a common mode, they can devise better solutions to problems at a more rapid pace! Consider the time wasted when team members aree not “on the same page”!

 

The class is introduced to the concept of Edward Debono’s six thinking hats in class during one 50-75 minute lecture period. The instructor wears the “blue hat,” quickly introduces each of the other hats and, in teams of four to five students, the class practices each hat while trying to come up with an innovation related to the common water bottle. 

Ideation/concept generation and team dynamics

Any class with design content or involving teamwork

Students experience how following a structured process to ensure parallel thinking can greatly enhance team productivity. Free canned slides for this and other ideation techniques as well as technical entrepreneurship case studies available at http://weaverjm.faculty.udmercy.edu

Requires a minimum of about an hour of class time. Instructor would do well to read Six Thinking Hats by Edward DeBono ahead of time--but should be able to get by based on examining the slides ahead of time.   

Could apply the technique to a different problem, such as the problem being addressed in the course. 

Susannah Howe, Smith College, showe@smith.edu

Students have an individual assignment to do a rough calculation related to their project (or course or larger activity, etc.).  Emphasizes the need to do rough approximate calculations, making assumptions where needed. I have given students a few days to do it, but when I presented this at the 2010 Capstone Conference, someone suggested it could also be done with a very short (ten-minute) turnaround. I use it to get students diving into the technical depth of their projects early on, before they fully know the territory, but it could be used in other ways too. Main thing is that it is actually done on the *back of an envelope*--this constrains how much the students can write and also adds some humor. 

technical calculation, approximation

any--could be a whole course, could be a team on a project. Works across all years.

Needs some structuring to identify an appropriate back-of-the-envelope calculation. More advanced students can often identify and frame these themselves; other students may need more assistance.

Jonathan Weaver

University of Detroit Mercy Mechanical Engineering Department

weaverjm@udmercy.edu

Begin by showing the class the selective attention test per this YouTube video. Note how many don’t see the person in the gorilla suit!

 

Each student must compile a ten-minute video basically of just passively observing people going about relatively typical activities - but knowing that the ultimate goal is to be able to identify possible unmet needs or new opportunities. The ten minutes could be one continuous segment or many shorter clips totaling ten minutes.

Each student reviews his or her video several times looking for unmet customer needs/opportunities. These could be fairly obvious or rather subtle--the latter being preferred. Opportunities could relate to difficulties/shortcomings associated with existing products or needs that a new product might address. The student submits
a list of opportunities identified and comes to class prepared to show a video.

A class session is devoted to watching each of the videos. For each video shown, each student is tasked with identifying as many unmet needs/opportunities as possible (except for the video's creator, who has already done so). We then share the needs the video's creator had identified and proceed to see how many additional opportunities the remainder of the class finds (typically many new needs are identified).

 

Grading includes the teacher's perception of how effective the video is at illustrating potential new opportunities, how many opportunities the student found in his/her own video, how many needs the student "missed" (i.e., that the other students found), and how many needs the student finds in the other students' videos.

Opportunity recognition, perception, customer needs analysis

Any class with design content or relating to customer needs

Activity is fun for students. Students realize they tend to see things through a particular lens/filter, and so others see things they miss and vice versa. Students are forced to passively observe potential customers. Little prep time for instructor.

All students must have access to digital video camera. 
Takes significant class time (depends of course on class size). 

Could assemble collection of "great videos" and watch them rather than have the students shoot the videos (although taking and analyzing the video is part of the learning process). Might try time lapse videos. For larger classes might have them work in teams or take the assignment off-line rather than watching them all in class. The video duration could also be reduced.