This is our last session, session ten in week three, and in this session, I'd like to talk to you about stories. About how to build powerful stories for yourselves, for your own lives, for your products, for your ideas, and I'll tell you some stories about some powerful stories, but before we begin, I'd like to give you an action learning exercise. Now this is an exercise I do with students in all of the innovation courses that I teach in many parts of the world. It's called a personal creativity machine, PCM. Each of us has a PCM, a personal creativity machine is your own personal unique method for generating an unending stream of creative ideas. So, I'd like you to take your laptop or a piece of paper, whichever you find comfortable, and sit down and do the following exercise. Describe briefly and truthfully, your own personal creativity machine. By that I mean, what is the systematic process you have used in the past and you will use in the future to create imaginative, practical ideas and then implement then. Be very specific and concrete. That's step one. What is your creativity machine? Your own personal one that works for you, that fits you personality, your history, your desires, your passion? Second, state how you validate your creative ideas and how you avoid rejecting good ideas and implementing bad ones. [COUGH] How will you test your ideas and choose good from bad? And then give an example. In the past, [COUGH] how did you use your PCM generate a creative idea, and if you wish, you can share your PCM with your discussion group and get some comments and learn from others, and constantly, constantly work on your PCM, see if you can sharpen it, improve it, but above all, above all use it. Use it every single day, and the more you use it, the better that machine will get. Sometimes, the more you use a machine, the more it wears out, but with a personal creativity machine, the more you use it, the better, and bette,r and better it gets. So, let me tell you a story. Perhaps before I do that, this is an example of a PCM from a student, one of my student named Gilles, and this is from a course that I taught at Babson College where, with professor Ted Grossman, the late professor Ted Grossman, we brought a group of Israelis and Palestinians together to study creativity and innovation, and to work together on business ideas, and this is a personal creativity machine essay, very short one, by a student named Gilles. I start by unblocking my imagination. I do so with the help of a childhood friend, the genie. Remember the genie, that you rub the lamp, and the genie appears? I choose to wish something for myself for someone else, poor, rich, young, and old, and after I do that the genie starts analyzing why I made that wish. Start with why, and start suggesting solutions for the need, the how and the what. As I'd like to keep my three wishes for really impossible stuff, I try to come up by myself with the same solutions that the genie is bringing up, only in different ways. So this is a possible creative exercise that I'd like you to try, the exercise of what if. Think about dreaming what if there was no gravity? [COUGH] What if I could speak to anyone in the world and they could understand me, and no matter what the language that they know and speak? What if, what if. Rub the lamp, ask the genie for a wish, think about what would happen if it came true, and then most important, think about how you can make it come true. Discovering ideas. Delivering ideas. So here's a story, it's a story of an amazing entrepreneur named Elon Musk, and how he used his own genie to dream about things and then actually make them happen. So, Elon Musk was born in South Africa. His mother was originally Canadian, she was born in Saskatchewan, like myself. I was born in Regina, Saskatchewan. Musk studied at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, that's where I studied, I'm originally Canadian. Went to University of Pennsylvania. [COUGH] Went to Stanford after he studied physics at the University of Pennsylvania, and he dropped out of Stanford to launch a company. So he launched a Yellow Pages directory called Zip2, which was sold to Compaq for $300 million. Musk himself made $21 million from the deal because he saw, just a few years after the World Wide Web was born, he saw how he could replace print city directories, print yellow pages, he had big dreams. He wanted to tackle, quote, important problems that would affect the future of humanity. The internet, clean energy, space, tackled the big issues. So, he founded a company that was to become PayPal because he had a key insight and observation. Money isn't pieces of paper, money is just an entry in a database. How many of us are stuck in this rut of defining money as coins, and paper, or checks? Money is just an entry in a database. The result of that simple insight, a company called PayPal. Elon Musk founded SpaceX, Space Exploration, to build commercial rockets. Until some of these companies, governments were the only ones who could afford to build these powerful rockets. They did it based on military technology. SpaceX Falcon 9 had many failures initially, it now has a NASA contract to supply the space station, replacing the space shuttle, and Musk, his dream is to create colonies on Mars and on the moon, and he says, I would like to die on Mars, just not on impact. Musk founded Solar City, which provides photovoltaic cells to generate power for the roofs of homes and businesses, and is one of the largest power companies in America, and he founded Tesla. Tesla's a car company that makes electric cars, and this sounds impossible. How in the world could a single entrepreneur create a company that does what huge companies with billions of dollars have failed to do? [COUGH] And he did. The Tesla car is a beautiful, environmentally friendly vehicle, and it's having success, but it was this close to failure, and Musk himself had to invest $40 million to keep Tesla alive in 2008, because the global financial crash created a recession. Tesla had no money and Musk kept it alive with $40 million of his own money. Person named Alexis De Tocqueville, French person who came to America 200 years ago, and wrote very persuasively and insightfully about America. He said that boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of America's rapid progress. Boldness, boldness of enterprise. That certainly characterizes Elon Musk. I wonder if it truly characterizes all of American business today, but it certainly characterizes entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. And one more story. From space and Internet, and electric cars, and changing the world, the story about a very modest little product, a product of a paper cup. Well this is the story of an immigrant who came to America. A lot of American creativity came from the energy of people who came from other countries, from immigrants, and Laszlo Buch came from Hungary with his family, his name became Leslie Buck, and he sold paper cups for a company that supplied restaurants and diners. He made an observation. His observation was [COUGH] that probably paper cups could be improved, a lot of the diners to which he was selling paper cups were run by Greek immigrants. The diner business was something that Greeks tended to go into and it just happened a lot of the diners in the New York area were run by persons of Greek origins. So Leslie Buck designed a paper cup based on an ancient Greek cup, and you can see on your screen, kind of a Greek sort of image or shape, and then a simple slogan that Leslie Buch wrote on the cup, we are pleased to serve you, and he called the cup Anthora, which is based on a Greek word amphora. Amphora, I understand, when you say it in Greek, kind of sounds like Anthora, and the Anthora cup captured the world. He didn't patent it, but he made a lot of money in commissions as a salesman selling this very, very popular cup, and he succeeded in his creative idea by emphatically understanding he's selling to people of Greek origin, and a cup with, looks like an ancient Greek cup, and called a name that kind of recalls the glory of ancient Greece, this will probably resonate with his customers. So that ends session ten, and it ends week three. I'd like to give you a brief preview of week four. We have ten sessions in week four, our last week together. I'm first going to remind you to work out, that your brain is a muscle, work it out. Recall those ten creativity exercises, ten plus one, that we talked about. I'll review some research done on creativity. What do we know about creativity, done by scholars, and how can we use what they've discovered? We'll talk about Walter Mitty, a dreamer invented by a writer named James Thurber. Inventing your career and reinventing yourself and your career. We'll talk about Einstein, da Vinci, and Edison and their secrets. Again, a lot more stories about creative products that created breakthroughs. We'll talk about the seven challenges and I'll review perhaps those challenges, and ask how you're progressing and coming up with answers, creative answers, creative solutions to the seven challenges. We'll ask you to take the Torrance test again for your creative thinking, so that we can measure, have you become measurably more creative since the course began, and have the ideas that we've given you, have they helped you produce more and better ideas. And then we'll wrap up the course, we'll ask you what you've learned, what you've implemented, and how have we changed you. And I'll give you a brief introduction to the second part of this course, the next four weeks, which is Cracking the Creativity Code, Part Two, Delivering Ideas. I'd like to thank you for joining us [COUGH] for these four weeks, and I hope you'll join us again for part two, Cracking the Creativity Code, Delivering Ideas, how to implement your wonderful creative ideas and actually make them happen to change the world. Good bye.
