CICOM25 - CREATIVITY, INNOVATION AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT

The teaching aims to provide knowledge and skills on how to reconcile creativity, habit, and strategic effectiveness by building a didactic of lateral thinking, examining theories, techniques and case studies that examine inventions, discoveries, and failures. In today's highly innovative organisations, creative processes are often proceduralised through the use of techniques that create routines. The expression 'creative habit' presupposes a paradoxical relationship that can generate competitive advantages and economies of scale. At the same time, it develops contraindications. It may favour or block radical innovation processes in favour of those of an incremental nature; it may speed up or slow down the implementation of inventions. Analysing the theories of the most well-known creativity experts - including academics, managers, entrepreneurs, and artists - we will examine creative triggering methods from different disciplinary fields, discovering meta-rules that presuppose the generation of new ideas. We will also examine the problematic and paradoxical relationships between innovation, invention, discovery, and creative processes, "understanding" the aforementioned processes under a sociological lens, with a focus on the decision-making processes induced by the expectations of the social actors involved. During the lectures, case histories will be examined and entrepreneurs and/or managers will be involved as expert testimonies.

Expected learning outcomes
At the end of the course, the student should possess the following skills and knowledge:

Distinguish the main definitions of the creative process given by the most important expert scholars in the field including sociologists, psychologists, economists, designers, and entrepreneurs.

Be able to understand the differences and relationships between the following concepts: creativity, innovation, invention, discovery, and serendipity.

Get to know the definitions given to the creative process by sociologists, economists, psychologists, and designers, in particular: Adorno, Alberoni, Csikszentmihalyi, Donati, De Bono, De Masi, De Solla Price, Gold, La Rosa, Luhmann, Maeda, Marcuse, Merton, Melucci, Munari, Pareto, Simmel, Simonton, Schumpeter, and Wright Mills.

To know the main rules inherent to models of stimulating the creative process: De Bono's lateral method. Munari's method Maeda's laws of simplicity. Gold's laws of fullness. The Blue Ocean strategy. Teresa Amabile's theories on creativity clichés. Levitt's theories on false myths of innovation.

Being able to compare methods, to extrapolate common meta-rules useful for triggering new ideas.

Autonomy of Judgement
The student will be able to manifest appropriate critical thinking about lateral thinking models, techniques, and meta-regulations.
The student will be able to use models and techniques in order to generate and/or propose new ideas.

Communication skills
The student will be able to:
- Engage in brainstorming.
- Combine, reverse, and fragment concepts useful for generating new ideas.
- Build a complementary relationship between vertical and lateral thinking.

Learning skills
The student will be able to:
- Carry out individual and group research on specific aspects of the course.
- Compare their skills with practice through case studies