Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Creativity

The chapter offers many different version of the definition for creativity. The definition that further relates to my experience is “the power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things…” (Sack, 1995, pp. 241-242). When I think of being creative, or thinking in a creative way, I think in a way that is not of the norm; not traditional. My new venture class was the basis for this type of thinking. Our main objective was to think outside of the box, and to think of alternative ways to solve not only existing problems, but to come up with our own ideas or ventures.
A good example of this is when we were doing our final presentation for our group new venture project. The last and final part of the project was to design a commercial that would fully show our marketing campaign. We wanted our commercial to stand out, because we wanted it to be one that people could remember. We ended up combining a puppet show, with real San Jose State students to offer a laughable view of our solution.
I think the biggest problem with being creative is that we are not taught to think differently. From my experience, we are taught to arrive at a solution via the same means. We are not taught that there are more ways to solve a problem. And the benefits to being creative far outweigh the traditional methods of “do as the book says.” If not for creativity, many of the luxuries that we’re used to might not be around today.

3 comments:

  1. I agree with you that many people do follow close to the book. For me, it started in math class where I would use the same kind of formulas to find a solution. My sister would always say, “That I trust the book too much.” Before, I did not know what that meant, but later realized that I did the same tasks at work. She thought I should provide some new ideas for the family restaurant. Since I always get calls from customers asking me if we offer a delivery service, I suggested to my sister that we should use this to our advantage. As we already have partners in helping us cater to parties and company meetings, we can provide take out delivery every day of the week. After I brought this idea up, my sister agreed and decided to implement it. That was an instance where thinking “outside the box” leads to a positive outcome.

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  2. I first like to say I like to say this was a well done response. While reading your response you used a great example that said “Power to originate, to break away from the existing ways of looking at things…”Hearing this made me think of group projects for class, while each group is trying to be creative and different from the rest, this makes presentation so interesting because each topic or view is presented in a different creative form or image. While one group may present basketball one way to the class another group can come out and present it totally different. Another example I can think of is the new old spice commercials which shows Terry Crews blocking older which the product is advertising shows a commercial in its creative form. We may not know it but the way an advertisement is presented to the public determines the outcome of the product. Well done I enjoyed reading this.

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  3. I agree. When it come sot school work it almost seems like a group would rather just get it done versus making it entertaining. I myself have been in groups that have no creativity and would rather just do what they have to rather than taking the time to make the project or presentation creative. I find the conformity piece to play a huge part in groups that are formed for school projects. A lot of people don’t want to throw out their ideas because they are afraid of what the other group members are saying. And sometimes people with just agree with an idea in order to not make waves. I completely agree with that statement saying that we really aren’t taught in a way that shows us there can more than one solution to a problem. Its like once and answer is found no one wants to dig deeper and see if there may be a more creative way to do it.

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