TeamLabs: Creative Entrepreneurship Academy 2016

Theme 2016

Designing Creative Ecosystems

Date: January 18-22, 2016
Venue: Tallinn, Estonia and Helsinki, Finland
Language: English
Participation: Pre-registration required and subject to a fee. 

Contact person for the programme: Ragnar Siil (e-mail: ragnar.siil@creativitylab.ee; phone: +372 514 0830)

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  The session takes its point of departure from the assumption that creativity, innovation and culture are important factors for the competitiveness of not only companies, but also for nations and regions, particularly as we move from goods and service economies to “experience” economies. While inarguably important, creativity is one of the most overused, if not ill-understood buzzwords in today’s business landscape. Companies and governments alike are eager to capitalize on the economic progress creativity promises – yet the formula remains often elusive. In this session, the participants will critically analyze and investigate questions about creativity’s role in the experience and creative economy. Why have creativity and the experience economy become the new creators of value for societies? How will these developments transform individuals, organisations and society? Which competencies will individuals, organisations and governments need in order to meet the challenges that the creative economy will bring about?

  As a result of the session the participants will:

  • Learn about creative businesses’ processes and framework conditions;
  • Understand the broad concepts of “experience economy” and “creative economy” – and the implications for industry, consumers and policy-makers;
  • Understand how government policy-makers work with the creative economy;
  • Gain insight into how the creative economy has impacted the organisation of – and the complexity and opportunities inherent in – managing creativity, innovation and change;
  • Understand how the creative economy has affected individuals as consumers, employees and citizens;
  • Gain an overview of the creative industry ecosystem in the Nordic and Baltic region.

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  The session will fall into 3 parts:

  • The Origins and Futures of the Creative City concept: This will highlight the dramatic changes that have occurred since the mid-1980s and how people looked to new resources to invigorate their cities, these include what is now called the creative economy, where we around 1985 developed some of the methodologies for assessing their impact and power. It also meant recycling buildings and regenerating whole areas of cities. It will then go on to what the priorities for creativity are now. Many examples from around the globe will be highlighted;
  • Addressing intractable problems through creativity: This will show a set of difficult problems in cities, again via examples, and show how creative approaches to city-making and rethinking the bureaucracy have led to more positive outcomes;
  • The uses and misuses of creativity: This will focus on the hype and problems of pumping up desire in cities and show how a new form of civic urbanity is a way of balancing and working with the best of creative approaches to city-making.

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  Governments across Europe are facing unprecedented pressure to do radically more with radically less. Growing fiscal austerity, social inequality, and changing demographics are just some of the forces putting extraordinary pressures on the public sector to transform itself. The “more for less” solutions that are being sought won’t happen by improving the existing solutions, but by fundamentally redesigning them. This imperative for strategic improvement, rather than process improvement, has created increasing demand for innovation skills in the public sector. There is an urgent need to redesign not just the form of government, but its services too. Design, in this context, is not just a process for shaping better services and decision-making, but also a process of managing risks and uncertainty. We will examine this question globally, but with a specific Nordic lens, speculating on the opportunities of leveraging design in rebalancing the social well being of a population with its economic growth. How can we innovate the creative ecosystem and what is design’s role in enabling a transition to the 21st century?

  Learning will include:

  • What is innovation in the public sector, and what is its role in addressing the current pressure to reform?
  • How to improve services through design.
  • How to improve strategic decision-making through design.
  • What does it means to take an integrative approach to problem-solving?
  • Prototyping: what is it and how can it help deliver better solutions?
  • What are strategies for building innovation capabilities?
  • What is happening globally: case studies of radical improvement through design.
  • Design as a tool to manage risk and uncertainty.
  • The economic, financial, and budgetary implications of the innovation process.

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  Entrepreneurship is at its core a creative endeavor. All of us at one point in time were in kindergarten, an especially creative habitat where we actively engaged in purposeful play. As we navigated our way through the experience of education, my sense is that too little time is devoted to honing our innate creative talents and playing with entrepreneurial opportunity.

  To fully embrace and exploit entrepreneurial opportunity we need to:

  • Rethink the process of how we explore opportunity
  • Encourage calculated risk-taking
  • Redefine failure as a discovery tool for what works
  • Be open to insights and perspectives from outside our established zones of comfort

  Aalto University was created with the express purpose of rethinking the game of university education. The university has developed habitats that recreate the feel of kindergarten – we will visit some of these and highlight their design elements. Habitat is a necessary but insufficient condition to unleash creativity. I also want to give you hands-on experience of engaging in purposeful play and share some insights from these action-based learning experiments with you. In the true spirit of co-creation, I am keen to begin a dialogue and platform to develop new experiences together.