Creativity Comes to B-School

GAME GURU.  At Yale, Feinstein uses historical figures and life stories to shed light on the creative process that contributed to such groundbreaking research as Einstein's theory of relativity. Feinstein teaches students about authors like Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, as well as artist Alexander Calder, to demonstrate that the creative process is just that -- a process just as accessible to them as to anyone else.

Instead of examining historical figures, marketing Professor Yoram Wind from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania , turns to today's creative leaders -- from architects Bob Venturi and Denise Scott Brown to game designer and Sony Online Entertainment CCO Raph Koster.

Hearing from such impressive speakers reinforces the importance of the unstructured problems that all managers face. "When we look at leaders, they all have a high level of tolerance for ambiguity," says Nina Godiwala, a second-year student in the course. "A lot of MBA students are not very good at that."

COMIC BOOKS.  Sometimes, students need to get outside the classroom to think outside the box. B-school students in Professor Jim Patell's "Entrepreneurial Design for Extreme Affordability" course at Stanford head to places like Burma to examine farming and irrigation methods in rural areas.

Business students are put in teams with engineers, designers, education students, computer scientists, even literature students, to confront a major problem in the developing world. Then they design and build working prototypes to attempt to correct it. The course's first offering resulted in the creation of a company called Cosmos Ignite Innovations that produces low-cost lighting systems for developing countries.

Patell says the most important component of the course is learning that it's O.K. to fail. "If you don't get something the first nine times, then you're encouraged to get it on the tenth, because this is school," he says. "We're not expected to solve these problems."

Learning to see things from different perspectives often requires interacting with a mix of people. On Mar. 21, MIT Sloan School of Business and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (SMFA) hosted "Twenty-First Century Visual Arts for Business Leaders," an intensive, one-day workshop that paired 12 Sloan students with master of fine arts students from the museum school.There were three components: digital animation, digital comic book storyboarding, and color.

STRANGE BEDFELLOWS.  As if drawing a cartoon storyboard wasn't different enough, MFA students gave the B-schoolers a twist. Students were divided into teams of two. Starting at opposite ends of the storyboard, one team drew the first panel and the other drew the last without looking at what the others had done. Each time they completed a box, the teams switched positions, so that they never got to draw two pictures in a row.

The challenge was to create a coherent narrative that worked from beginning to end while escaping their linear thinking patterns. "My team drew a yogi meditating on a mountain, and the other team drew a bunch of fish jumping out of an airplane," says Corey Halverson, a second-year student at Sloan. "We needed to think hard about how to connect those two panels."

Halverson says he will use lessons from the day's workshop in his future career in television media. As companies seek more innovative employees, MBAs who have learned techniques for cutting-edge creative thinking might have an edge in the new economy.

| 1 | 2 |  <<previous page