Generating Creative & Innovative Ideas

Description

About the course

What makes a person creative? Do you consider yourself creative? Certain personal characteristics have been linked with creativity – for example, a willingness to take risks, the ability to connect diverse ideas, and open-mindedness. And most important, perhaps, is believing that you are creative. Many people get stuck because they think ‘I’m not a creative person.’ But everyone has creative potential. Understanding the characteristics you possess that boost your creativity and those that inhibit it can help you enhance your creative output in the workplace.

 
This course explores the essential attributes of a creative person. It also describes barriers to creativity and how to overcome these. In addition, it demonstrates how you can enhance your creativity in the workplace. Materials designed to support blended learning activities aligned with this course are available from the Resources Page.
 

The course is broken down into 3 parts: 1. Enhancing your Creativity; 2. Maximising Team Creativity; and 3. Verifying and Building on Ideas.  Each part contains a series of separate lessons and areas.  Continue reading below to find out what these areas cover.

What’s in the course?

Enhancing your Creativity

• Assessing Your Creativity:  recognise the importance of various personal characteristics of creative people
• Overcoming Barriers to Creativity:  recognise ways to overcome personal barriers to creativity
• Boosting Your Creativity Quotient:  match techniques for enhancing creativity with examples of how to execute them; identify the benefits of being creative

• Characteristics of a Creative Work Environment:  recognise characteristics that foster team creativity in a work environment
• Brainstorming Techniques:  recognise the five steps for brainstorming creative ideas
• Using Brainstorming to Generate Ideas:  facilitate a brainstorming session to generate ideas for a given situation
• Role Playing Techniques:  recognise how role playing helps teams generate creative ideas

• The Creative Process:  match each stage of the creative process with the description of its purpose
• Verifying the Workability of Creative Ideas:  determine which method to use to verify the workability of an idea in a given scenario; identify statements that describe the purpose and activities of the verifying stage of the creative process
• Building on Ideas:  use criteria for evaluating a build to determine the best proposed build for a given idea; identify criteria-based questions that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of a suggestion made to build on an idea

How is each course taught?

All courses are online and self-paced, meaning you do it in your own home, in your own time, at your own pace.  Each lesson is pre-recorded allowing you to pause, fast-forward, skip sections, or go back to another lesson if you need to.  The lessons are multi-media based, which means video and audio are used to teach the lessons.  Most lessons are also interactive, prompting the learner to participate.  This involves answering on-screen questions, and participating in tasks.

How long will it take me to complete each course?

As mentioned above, our courses are self-paced.  Some people finish their course faster than others.  The total running time for the combined courses however is 3 hours.

What do I need?

All you need is an internet connection and a PC.  While most of the lessons work on MACs, we recommend you use a PC for the best performance.  Certain parts of the course may not display properly on older MACs.  Once you’ve logged into your course, you may be prompted to down certain free plugins such as Java.  Just follow the on-screen prompts.