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 CREATIVITY  TOOLS

 
Business schools should improve creativity training and coaching of doctoral students and young faculty.

Business schools should pay more attention to creativity and literacy of scholarly work.

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Specifically, business schools should improve creativity training and coaching of doctoral students and young faculty.

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Innovation management as a field has shown that creativity, ideation, idea development, are all processes that can be trained with tools. We offer more information about such tools here. To stimulate more impactful research, doctoral students and young faculty could be trained on these types of tools.

 4  TYPES OF CREATIVITY TOOLS

YOU CAN FIND MORE INFO IN CREATIVITYLABS.EU

TOOLS TO HELP YOU SET RESEARCH DOMAINS

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  • Research domain tools provide direction to where to look for research problems

  • Domains are the tangible expression of what we want to research in

  • Applying these tools helps researchers drive and focus efforts in areas expanding the current research focus

  • An example of these tools is the "Me, Myself, and I" tool, which offers a multifaceted exploration on who a scholar is and what makes her uniquely positioned in her field (see below)

  • Other tools include: (i) Your Collaboration Team, (ii) Trendspotting tools (STRETCH, STaR), (iii) Things you see, hear and say, etc.

Example of domain setting tool: "Me, Myself, and I"
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TOOLS FOR IMMERSION

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  • Immersion tools stimulate doctoral students and young faculty to immerse in their research problems by working with the target audience of their research (e.g., policy-makers, industry, NGOs, governmental organizations, etc).

  • These tools also push scholars to carefully and rigorously define the context and root causes of the problems they want to study

  • Lastly, they push scholars to ask the "so what" question: Why is this topic relevant and important?

  • An example of these tools is the "Research Problem Development Matrix" (see below)

  • Other tools include: (i) primary and secondary "customer" identification, (ii) exploratory research techniques (interviews, observation, DIY), (iii) "how might we's", (iv) prioritization matrix, .

Example of immersion tool: "Research Problem Development Matrix"
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TOOLS FOR IDEATION

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  • Ideation tools stimulate doctoral students and young faculty to generate great research questions.

  • These tools build on the science of creativity to avoid fixating on conventional ideans and, instead, stimulate the development of novel and useful ideas

  • An example of these tools is the "White and Dark Horsing" (see below), which stimulates the generation of a high volume of ideas which are then selected with the help of other tools

  • Other tools include: (i) idea napkins, (ii) 'how might we's', (iii) real-win-worth scoring, (iv) prioritization matrices.

Example of ideation tool: "White and Dark Horsing"
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TOOLS FOR MATURATION

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  • Maturation tools help doctoral students and young faculty advance their research questions into a full-fledged contribution statement and research project proposal

  • For instance, these tools push scholars to carefully and rigorously identify their paper's main contribution to academia and practice

  • They also ask scholars to clarify "how" they will conduct the research (e.g., team, method, data), "where" they would like to publish the research and what is the ultimate impact they would like to achieve with a specific research project

  • An example of these tools is the "Beta Research Projetc Canvas" (see below)

  • Other tools include: (i) assumption matrix (to prioritize which assumptions to test), (ii) hypotheses action cards, (iii) research project pitch deck template, etc.

Example of immersion tool: "Beta Research Project Canvas"
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