Results-oriented brainstorming

With a shared interest in business-building, 70 students and faculty from colleges and universities around the Capital Region came to Skidmore College's Tang Teaching Museum March 28 to have their comfort zones challenged.

The event was "Design Thinking," a half-day workshop aimed at fostering the participants' creative confidence and push them beyond the boundaries of traditional academic disciplines.

"Design thinking is nothing more than brainstorming in a really structured fashion," said Catherine Hill, F. William Harder Professor of Business Administration, in her opening remarks. "It's a methodology for producing reliably innovative results in any field."

Hill assembled the meeting as the last in a year-long "Startup Series" organized by Accelerate518, a loose consortium of faculty that "wants to light a fire under entrepreneurship in the region," she said.

Through a series of exercises in the four-hour session, Hill demonstrated techniques she uses to productively brainstorm ideas and refine business plans.

"We start with the premise that all of your ideas suck," she declared, generating a laugh. "You don't mean for them to suck, but they probably do. What we do at Skidmore is to take a hard look at our ideas, iterate on all different points of our business plan, so we can make the business plans better for everybody."

"The iterative process always works best when you have different minds, from different places in the world and from different disciplines because it's in that interstitial space that the real creativity happens," she continued.

"Design thinking always starts with empathy. You then define the problem, you ideate about the solution, you prototype about the solution, you test the solution, and then you start all over again."

All of this led to the first exercise in which two partners interview each other in a highly structured process toward the ultimate goal of giving each other the "perfect gift" -- a present ideally suited to his or her needs. Their raw materials consisted of little more than construction paper, pipe cleaners, tape, and markers. Among the more creative gifts was a pair of well-crafted "virtual reality glasses" that would enable the recipient to savor the experience of lying on a beach in the Caribbean.

Next was a session led Rachel Seligman, assistant director for curatorial affairs at the Tang, and Michael Janairo, the Tang's director of community outreach, that explored essential concepts about brand by examining the works of Nicholas Krushenick, currently on exhibit.. What, for example, does it say about an artist's brand if his paintings are exhibited at the Tang as opposed to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art? What does it say about an artist's brand if he studied with one celebrated artist as opposed to another?

In the workshop's final hour, Skidmore theater major Gavin Berger '15 led the group in a series of improv exercises, including "yes, and" brainstorming designed to open possibilities more effectively than the "yes, but" variety. Standing in circles, participants collaboratively told stories, starting with a a simple word prompt and adding words in rapid-fire fashion.

Surveyed about the program, students were unanimous in saying their schools should again partner in offering the StartUp Series and all said they would recommend the program to a friend interested in starting a business.

"I am grateful to all of my partners in Accelerate518, without whom none of this could have happened," said Hill. 

 

(photos by Anna Sand '16)