Juho Salminen
Chercheur, Lahti School of Innovation, Lappeenranta University of Technology
Laura Mellanen
Coordonnatrice, Lahti School of Innovation, Lappeenranta University of Technology (Finlande)
Engineering creativity: exploring possibilities of co-creation
Innovation, collective intelligence and crowdsourcing are currently gaining interest in management literature. Combining them all in a meaningful way is not a trivial task. Using an early conceptual draft of such a combination as a theoretical background we designed a visual arts based workshop to demonstrate and explore the model. In this paper outline of the workshop design is explained and its relationship to conceptual model is discussed.
We facilitated a workshop at Artistic Mediation and Managerial Innovation International Symposium in Montreal, Canada, on 5 December 2011. The workshop was designed to demonstrate some of the aspects of the conceptual model and to explore how the model might work in the practice. The idea was to separate problem definition and idea generation phases to different groups and explore whether it is feasible to do so. Visual arts inspired approach was used to make the abstract model more concrete in the workshop.
Participants of the workshops were divided in two groups. The first group was given a description of a managerial problem. Their task was to build a representation of the problem using visual artwork, pictures and sticky notes. The second group would then be presented the representation. Their task was to borrow suggestions for solutions from all possible places they could think of. After that the original problem was revealed to the second group. Finally, the second group made a new combination of their partial solutions they had gathered and turned the representation of the problem to a representation of a solution.
Managerial problem given to participants:
“Most companies and organizations have a vision and strategy which should work as base and goal for all the actions. Many times the reality of the organizational life is more complicated and it can be very challenging to put the strategy in action and practice. The theory doesn't meet the practice.
What employees do on Monday morning doesn't necessarily correspond to the strategy.
This phenomenon happens for many reasons that are crucial to recognize in order to overcome the problem.”
The workshop demonstrated how in principle the first phases of innovation process could be divided up. The representations of problems and solutions created during the workshop arguably demonstrated some level of emergence. Interactions of simple tasks performed by participants led to something different than the sum of individual parts: pictures and artwork were combined to form rather abstract descriptions of problems and solutions that recited partly in visual representations and partly in the minds of the participants. Although the workshop was more experimental and speculative than scientific by nature, the demonstration could still give suggestions on how crowdsourcing applications for innovation creation could be improved to better utilize the collective intelligence of large groups of people.
We facilitated a workshop at Artistic Mediation and Managerial Innovation International Symposium in Montreal, Canada, on 5 December 2011. The workshop was designed to demonstrate some of the aspects of the conceptual model and to explore how the model might work in the practice. The idea was to separate problem definition and idea generation phases to different groups and explore whether it is feasible to do so. Visual arts inspired approach was used to make the abstract model more concrete in the workshop.
Participants of the workshops were divided in two groups. The first group was given a description of a managerial problem. Their task was to build a representation of the problem using visual artwork, pictures and sticky notes. The second group would then be presented the representation. Their task was to borrow suggestions for solutions from all possible places they could think of. After that the original problem was revealed to the second group. Finally, the second group made a new combination of their partial solutions they had gathered and turned the representation of the problem to a representation of a solution.
Managerial problem given to participants:
“Most companies and organizations have a vision and strategy which should work as base and goal for all the actions. Many times the reality of the organizational life is more complicated and it can be very challenging to put the strategy in action and practice. The theory doesn't meet the practice.
What employees do on Monday morning doesn't necessarily correspond to the strategy.
This phenomenon happens for many reasons that are crucial to recognize in order to overcome the problem.”
The workshop demonstrated how in principle the first phases of innovation process could be divided up. The representations of problems and solutions created during the workshop arguably demonstrated some level of emergence. Interactions of simple tasks performed by participants led to something different than the sum of individual parts: pictures and artwork were combined to form rather abstract descriptions of problems and solutions that recited partly in visual representations and partly in the minds of the participants. Although the workshop was more experimental and speculative than scientific by nature, the demonstration could still give suggestions on how crowdsourcing applications for innovation creation could be improved to better utilize the collective intelligence of large groups of people.