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Abstract: The paper introduces a method to stimulate creativity and innovation and explores the question of how to teach and learn emergent co-creation and entrepreneurial orientation for innovation. The paper presents how an improvisation based model for boosting creativity and innovation was developed and implemented through eight innovation events among adult M.Sc. degree students and city servants. Furthermore, the paper presents participant experiences gathered from 213 participants involved in the co-creation event. The findings of the study indicate that the developed method has a high potential for boosting and teaching co-creation. The findings of the study are encouraging both providing positive and learning experiences as well potential for various organizational and workplace development, team building, innovation and educational purposes.
Keywords: co-creation; emergent; temporary; improvisation; teaching: entrepreneurial orientation; creativity: innovation; ad-hoc.
1 Introduction
Actually, creative problem solving in ad hoc groups has been identified as one of the critical future skills humans have in comparison to fast developing automatization, robotization and articifical intelligence. Hence, creativity and innovation are increasingly co-creative activities constituting of integration of knowledge, expertise, creativity and passion of diverse participants for particular problems of challenges. Thereby various short term innovation events aim to build informal and effective space to boost creativity, enhance co-creation and thereby innovativeness, but often conducted outside the formal organizations, where innovation process may even seem like ad hoc events for playful nerds. Hence, novel forms of co-creation are gaining in popularity yet there is less understanding how to boost creativity and innovativeness within these settings.
Creativity and innovation are emerging, social, participative, contextual and non-linear processes, and to boost such process is a challenge. One body of creativity techniques, such as lateral thinking (De Bono, 1992) and brainstorming (Osborn, 1953) put efforts on generation of large number of ideas (De Bono, 1992; Osborn, 1953; Paulus and Brown, 2003) and the following collaborative processes of idea development. A brainstorming is a group ideation and idea exchange process conducted with specific rules (Osborn, 1953). The planned process with rules may also limit the creative potential of groups (Paulus and Brown, 2003) and the brainstorming groups may also suffer from productivity loss (Nijstad et al., 2003; Camacho and Paulus, 1995; Heslin, 2009). Another body of innovation stimulating methods, such as...