Problems as opportunities

Yesterday I put up a video of a talk I encouraged you to view, about creativity and entrepreneurship. In case you don't have time (or an instant review if you did), here are some key points:

Tina Seelig of the Stanford Technology Venture Program gave a fascinating one hour lecture on “The Art of Teaching Entrepreneurship and Innovation” in which she talked about an experiment with her students. She gave them an envelope containing five dollars of seed funding and told them to plan a way to make the most money in four hours. Here are some of the findings:

• ·      The teams that experimented along the way did better.
• ·      The teams that made more money didn’t focus on the five dollars but on the value of their time and ideas.
• ·      Often we frame the problem too tightly. The opportunities are bigger than we think at the beginning. The winners sold three minutes of their class time presenting their results, to a company that wanted to recruit those students.

 The next time she gave students only a handful of paper clips. One of the teams traded the paperclips for some poster board on which they wrote, “Stanford students for sale. Buy two, get one free.” First they were asked to carry groceries, but eventually they were asked for higher-level tasks, including leading a brainstorming session at a company that rewarded them with three computer monitors.

 To see the winners of subsequent contests, put in “tournament” in the search box at Ecorner.stanford.edu and follow Twitter@ecorner.

(for great ideas on how to be more creative--and how to turn your ideas into action--see my new book, "Creativity Now!" available from Amazon and other booksellers.)