Hey readers / future self,
This class has been one of my favorites to date and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of taking a class at the business school. It has been a wonderful combination of marketing and sustainability, all while introducing myself and my peers to innovation, ie my favorite aspect of the course. All of the brainstorming sessions were highly invigorating, I learned so much about the process of innovating throughout these sessions, and these will definitely be my biggest takeaway from the course. Being a degree seeking student the business school, I felt that all of these heightened brainstorming and talking sessions within my group were very important, and that I would have really benefited from these processes somehow having been integrated within the business block. It was so beneficial meeting early on in our groups, coming up with ideas over the course of many hours, throwing things away and coming up with new and “wild” ideas to fuel our creativity, as well as allowing us to receive multiple versions of the final product, continuously improving with tons of feedback. Although the business block is great and we do a lot of innovative group work, we aren’t necessarily taught or even introduced to such ideas of brainstorming. I thought that this was a great highlight of the class; actually being forced to get together and solely brainstorm for so long. This is where we found our best and most creative ideas, ones that we never would have come up with outside of this process. What I’m trying to say is, I wish I’d known these practices before my business block, that way I could have brought the hands on process of post-it brainstorming and “How Might We” statements into other classes as well – I will for sure be doing this in the future.
Looking back, I especially enjoyed the first round of presentations on sustainable companies. This is where I learned the bulk of the material regarding sustainable information, and although we continued to read up on sustainability throughout the process of design, I almost wish I’d gotten the chance to learn a little bit more about what makes a product sustainable, and how to implement sustainably and socially responsible business practices while maintaining the business atmosphere and attitude. In other words, where do we draw the line in terms of seeking profit and social responsibility efforts? I guess this is more intuitive, but I’d love to have learned more ways to analyze companies in deciphering between the puffery and the truth of sustainable efforts in todays age of sustainability pushes.
More so than learning about the issues and opportunities of product/service sustainability, I feel that throughout this class I have learned how to enter the innovation & entrepreneurship mindset. Specifically referencing the brainstorming sessions in which as a group we took some quiet time and just wrote down a lot of ideas in a short period of time. We would then organize the ideas, discuss, and vote on the best ones using a dot system. This utilization of dots was a great idea. I found that this way, no one with a bigger personality could argue their way into one idea or another, everyone had their votes and the post its with the most votes would move forward. I found myself frustrated at some points during this process because I wanted some different ideas to go through, which just didn’t get the votes.
Along similar lines, I really appreciated the layout of the course. Having this one project spread throughout the entire semester with shorter respective deadlines was very helpful. My group was able to organize ourselves well, meeting many times in order to split up the work and stay on top of our goals by monitoring each other’s progress and motivating the team toward our end goal. REMEMBER: be open to experimenting optimistically! Don’t close yourself off to ideas because they seem too outside the norm, instead listen to what your team members have to say and collaborate regardless of initial judgements. Be curious in working through different brainstorming sessions, ask questions to find out what team members are thinking. When you’re early in the collaboration and prototyping process, be open to feedback! Don’t try to sell your idea too early on, be honest in admitting mistakes and ignorance, and take advantage of critiques while you can. You want to know what is unclear and what listeners/ potential users have questions about.
Retain information!!
xoxo Lana