Blog 6 - Thoughts on Creativity - Due 25-Oct

First, please note that I took Pranay's suggestion and moved the due date back to end-of-day on Friday, October 25th.  I hope that helps your week a bit.  Having move the deadline for the blog, I would still really appreciate you all completing the assigned articles for Wednesday.

There have been a number of assertions and many pages of research about creativity and there still seems to be a good bit of debate about what makes people and organizations more creative (and, then, assumedly, more innovative)

The response for this is a bit more open than the previous blog topics.  Overall, I want to hear your thoughts about creativity and innovation as an individual and within organizations.  Here are some questions you can consider, but you can address other issues related to this topic if you have other things to say on this.

1.  What are you personal experiences with individual creativity?  Have you had times when you felt especially creative or, even, especially uncreative?

2.  What are your personal experiences with organizational creativity?  Have you worked at companies that felt or behaved in ways that made them more creative or, even, especially uncreative?

3.  Do you think you, as an individual, are even capable of being creative by yourself?  And, better yet, do you think a group within an organization is capable of being creative?  

4.  What do you think about the idea of different creative types of problems and, thus, different creative processes?  Should we trust ourselves just to know or sense when we need one type of approach versus another?

As always, please keep the blog guidelines in mind, which are posted in top right column of the page.

Blog 5 - Visualizing Insights - Due 21-Oct

For this next blog, I'd like you to get some experiences thinking about and even trying to build a visualization of data.  You may want to look at the slides I've posted on Blackboard for our session next Monday for inspiration and a wide range of visualization ideas.  Warning: the file sizes are really big (https://courses.utexas.edu, so be prepared when downloading.

The first step of this blog is to find a source of quantitative data.  You can choose a data source yourself or use one of my suggestions below from Mintel (I've posted the report summaries that you can use on Blackboard under Course Documents/Blog Stuff).  I've tried to find a few reports that seemed interesting to me.  The data source you use should be fairly simple for this first exercise, so do not choose one that is overly complicated (or choose just a piece of that data).
 
This one will not be graded based on word length, but, rather, the effort and creativity of your visualization approach.  What you produce does not need to be pretty - I'm not assuming you know how to use Adobe Illustrator or similar package, so you are welcome to draw it out very simply or do a basic representation in Powerpoint or something similar.  So, I'll be looking at how much data you attempt to represent and your effort to push yourself to visualize in a way that tells an interesting story.  Be bold and experimental with this - I promise to reward you for your audacity.

Report Topics from Mintel
Dollar & Discount Retailing Customers
Food Trucks
Fragrances
Marketing to Non-Traditional Parents
Red Meat
Retailer Loyalty Programs
Teen & Tween Beauty and Personal Care Consumer

Blog 4 - Personalized Topic Report - Due 9-Oct

I want you to use this next blog as an opportunity for you to explore your paper topic. This is not a final contract on your topic - you can certainly change your topic after you write this. The whole point of this blog is to explore the topic enough so that you and I feel comfortable about your ability to create a full paper out of it. Here is what I would like to see included:

- Idea for the topic, fleshed out as much as possible - this can also include all the questions you have about the topic at this point. Use the blog as a brainstorming session for yourself to get your ideas out there and make this a first attempt at organizing your thoughts around the topic.

- Why is this topic interesting to you? Remember: this is a big goal for the assignment!

- What is the connection to the gathering and identification of key customer insights, the design of valuable customer experiences, , the design thinking process, and/or the analysis or development of a business model framework? (at least, as you see it right now)

- Cite and briefly describe at least one article that is related to your topic (this can be either an academic article or trade article, at this point). Do your best to find an article that might be a central source or guidepost for your paper.

Do not forget the minimum length guidelines. Also, try NOT to write in sentence fragments, although a list here and there is fine.

I will be reading all of these posts so that I can provide feedback on what you have thus far.

Students often ask me for example topics, so I thought I would give you a few examples from past semesters.  Please keep in mind that the goal of this paper is for you to choose something YOU are interested in rather than choosing a topic that would really be of interest to someone else.

"Hispanics as Early Tablet Adopters: What does this mean for technology companies in the future?"
"The Modern Man, Post-Divorce"
"Take a Shot: Using Design Thinking to Develop a New Bar Concept"
"Using Augmented Reality to Create Enriching Customer Experiences"
"Who Will Win: Apple, Google, Facebook, or Amazon?"
"Rise of Collaborative Consumption and Its Relevance to Our Startup"

Have fun with it!