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Is it innovative to borrow and adapt?

Course video 17 of 48

Cracking the Creativity Code: Discovering Ideas

Technion — Instituto de Tecnologia de IsraelTechnion, Instituto de Tecnologia de Israel

Curso 1 de 4 no Startups e empreendedorismo Programa de cursos integrados

Skill at discovering new ideas, and delivering them, may be one of the most important practical job skills, in today’s and tomorrow’s job market. Creativity is an acquired skill, one that improves with practice. This course aims to empower individuals who believe they have lost their innate creativity, because they, their employers or teachers prefer the three R's: replication, repetition and rote, to innovation. We show how to re-ignite rusty creative powers. During this course, you will learn proven tools, frameworks and concepts useful for discovery– generating an endless stream of new ideas implementing at least some of those ideas with skill and persistence, based on books and articles written by the instructors. In the first part of the course, you will learn a proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’ that makes creativity more accessible to everyone. In the following weeks, you will learn practical proven tools useful for delivering ideas by employing the basic principles of business and management. You will practice the method, use it to tackle challenging real-world needs and produce a 2-3 minutes video presenting your idea. Course Learning Outcomes On successfully completing this four-week course, you will be able to: - Manage a process to generate an unending stream of creative ideas - Lead a process of innovation and implement ideas through all phases from discovery to delivery. - Apply creativity to a wide range of strategic management issues. - Solve problems with a high degree of innovation, creative thinking and risk taking. - Use and apply proven structured method for generating and implementing world-changing ideas known as ‘Zoom in, Zoom out, Zoom in’. - Develop and implement an innovation in your own practice. - Identify new and unfamiliar challenges and reflect on these challenges from a creative point of view, action they require and service they provide. - Demonstrate creative problem solving skills for defining, structuring and solving real world operations management problems.

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Ministrado por

Prof. (Emeritus) Shlomo Maital
Prof. Shlomo Maital Sr. Research Fellow, S. Neaman Institute, Technion

Transcrição

Welcome back to Cracking the Creativity Code, Session #5 in week two.

And in this session, I want to raise a question.

Is it truly creative, and truly innovative to borrow an idea and adapt it?

Do you have to invent the idea?

Or can you take an existing idea and

somehow change, adapt, improve it, strengthen it?

Is that true creativity?

And in order to discuss and illustrate this important question,

I want to talk about a very familiar product that you all are familiar with.

M&Ms, this product.

And tell you the story about M&Ms, and use M&Ms to make my point.

So, how was M&Ms discovered?

M&Ms have been around for a very long time.

A man named Forrest Mars went to Spain in 1936 to the Spanish Civil War.

A number of Americans volunteered in the Spanish Civil War.

A civil war between left and right, Socialists and Fascists, the bitter war.

A war with an unhappy end.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

Forest Mars in his travels in Spain discovered something interesting,

he observed something.

Spanish soldiers wanted to take chocolate into the field,

it's a great source of quick energy, but Spain's a very hot country.

If you take chocolate, a piece of chocolate into the field.

Pretty soon it becomes a sticky gooey mess, and it's of no use at all, inedible.

But they discovered a solution, and they took a chocolate and

they covered the chocolate with hard candy.

So they could put it in their pocket and

take it out and have a chocolate snack, and it wouldn't melt.

The hard candy kept the chocolate from simply melting.

And Forrest Mars observed this.

Other people had seen this.

He observed it and he saw great potential in this,

this idea discovered in the field by Spanish soldiers.

And there's an important point here.

People have needs.

We have needs.

And all the time people, individuals themselves,

are finding solutions to very big challenges.

They're very creative solutions.

It's not always companies.

Research and development is done very often by ordinary people,

not just by huge organizations and companies spending billions of dollars.

And if we observe how people kind of solve their challenges,

meet their needs in creative ways, sometimes we can change the world.

And that's what Forrest Mars did.

He zoomed in on the issue of bringing chocolate to people,

in a way that it would melt in your mouth, not in your hand.

That became the Mars M&M's slogan or mantra.

He zoomed out to the Spanish Civil Ear, observed a solution.

Then he did another zoom in to make this happen and to produce a viable,

successful commercial product.

He didn't know much about the candy business.

He found a strategic partner, Round Trees of British.

A candy company, a venerable confectionary company.

He found a partner in America who understood chocolate.

Forrest Mars didn't.

Actually, someone related to the Hershey family.

Hershey of course was a well established chocolate company in,

in America and the result was to create M&Ms,

chocolate covered candy covered chocolate.

And later peanuts that were covered by candy.

And this happened in World War 2.

Mars was a product, M&Ms was a product that American soldiers used.

It brought them quick energy snacks on the battlefield, and the rest is history.

That's a long time ago, that's 60 or

70 years ago, and M&M's continues to be a strong,

well-selling product with relatively few changes made in the product.

Maybe different color here and there.

But part of creativity is creating great value for people and

widening the range of choice.

Providing them with a confectionary and then somehow just maintaining it.

Maintaining that value through a very long period of time.

So, Mars is still a family owned and controlled company.

This is the Mars bar, and they have many other products.

I guess the flagship product still is M&M's.

Of course, one of the Ms is Forest Mars,

the originator of the company going back to the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and

it was actually a breakthrough discovery that he observed in the field and

greatly improved, rather than something that he invented from scratch.

This is the story of Mars and our point that sometimes you discover

ideas rather than simply invent them out of your own mind.

Please join us when we go on to talk about some other stories about zoom out,

in session six.

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