Inquiry To Innovation

​In the honors seminar Inquiry to Innovation, our theme was Game Changers. The vision in the course was to identify a problem or issue on campus that we felt strongly about and, in teams, design and possibly implement a solution to our issue. All of the coursework was geared toward this goal, but also to provide us with tools to be creative and solve problems in teams for the rest of our lives. We learned how to effectively brainstorm and how to create ‘meaningful space’. We read and discussed the book A Whack on the Side of the Head by Roger von Oech which is about creativity, how to be creative, and how to believe that you truly are creative by removing mental blocks to creativity. We used some of those strategies in order to come up with ideas for our own projects. One that my team used was called ‘playing the fool’. That is, when you want something to work but you don’t know how to implement it, think about and discuss strategies that won’t work and try to make them work. We used this when discussing our marketing plan and while it sounds silly, it really does work! Our group’s focus was on building meaningful diverse relationships on campus. We created an executive summary describing our vision, goals, and plan which I have posted below.