Consumers are being offered more and more opportunities to customize their products and services, and are increasingly seeking to express their creativity through their purchasing choices. As entrepreneurs, we have the ability to shape the consumer environment in ways that help consumers enhance their own creative abilities, and develop a unique relationship with them as a result.
This course is aimed at anyone who wants to understand what we actually know (as opposed to what we think we know) about human creativity, and how to use this knowledge to think differently and productively about business challenges. As the focus is on creativity as a cognitive function, it does not matter what your background is, what industry you come from or want to enter.
After completing this course, past students report having acquired a set of strategies that enable them to tackle business problems with a fresh perspective.
This course is part of the HEC Paris MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. If you are admitted to the full program, your coursework will count towards your degree program
Syllabus
WEEK 1
Module 1: Anatomy of creativity
As we embark in your first creativity course, our first module focuses on understanding what creativity is, how others and you perceive it, and where those perceptions come from.
WEEK 2
Module 2: The Importance of Positive Affect for Creativity
The best of your creative potential brings together the best of your thinking, the best of your feeling and the best of your doing. Because it is often relatively ignored, this module focuses entirely on the importance of affect in creativity. Beyond intellectually understanding this importance, the module requires you to become an active observer of what affects you, versus what does not, in your daily life. It also teaches you how to harness these experiences to get a creative advantage.
WEEK 3
Module 3: Shaping Your Creative Environment
In module 2, we saw how you can work on your internal experience to enhance your creative potential. In module 3, we focus on how you can shape your external environment to constrain the creative process in a beneficial way.
WEEK 4
Module 4: Introducing You to Step-by-Step Instructions
In our last module, we dug deeper into the concept of an environmental variable that received considerable attention in creativity research, and also clearly applied to the business world: the external guidance that you get during the creative process. While many different types of guidance exist, module 4 introduces you to a few examples that have been documented to show remarkable traction in business.