101 Activities For Teaching Creativity And Problem Solving

101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &

Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of Wiley. http://www.pfeiffer.com

Savage capitalized on his strengths and borrowed a concept from someone else.

Once he had copied the basic idea, he turned the concept into a creative product

suited for his business. Savage was a Copy Cat.

3. Have each group think of a story or event similar to their problem, describe it in
   detail, and use the descriptions as potential stimuli to copy for resolving the
   group problem.


4. Tell them to write down any ideas on Post-it®Notes (one idea per note) and place
   them on flip charts for evaluation.

Debrief/Discussion

Ask the groups to discuss the following types of questions:

• How easy was it to think of similar ideas?


• How did the similarity of another idea affect your ability to apply it to your chal-
  lenge? Were more similar ideas easier or more difficult to apply?


• To what extent did your knowledge of other ideas affect your ability to apply the
  ideas?


• Would this technique work better with only certain types of problems? If so, what
  types?

Also consider having participants debrief using the following questions:

• What was most helpful about this exercise?


• What was most challenging?


• What can we apply?


• How would you rate the value of this exercise to helping us with this issue?


• Will this exercise be helpful in the future for other sessions?


• What did you learn?


• What will we be able to use from this exercise?


• What ideas were generated, and which ones were most interesting?

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