Building a visionary spirit and promoting responsible innovation
One of the most ambitious student experiences in the world dedicated to creativity, imagination, critical thinking and responsible innovation.
THE CHALLENGE:
iMagination Week aims at helping business students develop critical skills for their future professional life: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking and inquisitive posture by taking them out of their comfort zone.
Type A students who are extremely competitive, used to doing what they are told and providing only correct answers. The goal is to train them to adapt to a VUCA world where there are no perfect answers.
A request made by the head of the program was to step out from a design thinking methodology and design a dedicated methodology that would help students envision the future in 2050. Whilst design thinking is a great framework, it was not the correct framework to allow students to project themselves in 2050.
Training a team of extremely experienced coaches and facilitators who were not all tech savvy yet
We know the importance of making Education institutions - especially innovative programs such as this one - more adaptable to change and its consequences from both a learning environment for its students & teacher and, administration system perspective for its staff. We needed to find the best online platform that would allow for creative collaboration considering that there were 1,000 people, in real time, over 2 weeks.
THE OUTCOME:
2 continents,
21 nationalities,
30 tutors,
175 responsible innovation projects created by the students
980 students,
25000 hours of iMagination method allowed students to connect with their passion and embrace uncomfortable ideas
Practices of dual working environment and collaborative online tool for global teams by students
Credit: Xavier Pavie
THE STORY:
iMagination Week was first launched in 2012 on the French Campus and introduced to the Singapore Campus in 2015. Our 2021 edition was the most ambitious one both in terms of size and in terms of condition: 850 students online, on different time zones and the rest of them in Dual mode).
“iMagination Week aims at enriching students culturally by taking them out of their comfort zone. The iMagination Week confronts them with transdisciplinary experts, instilling a "visionary" spirit. Its objective is to help them become aware of societal challenges and start questioning their contributions. It is aimed at helping them develop critical skills for their future professional life: creativity, collaboration, critical thinking, inquisitive posture. Stimulating their imagination is key to enhancing responsible innovation”.
The theme "Way of Life 2050" was an incentive to project yourself as change makers by adopting new ways of living, thinking, working and leading. The students had to create an original project by working as a team, with the help of tutors, and coming up with an innovative and responsible solution about lifestyles and how they would like to live their future and impact positively the world.
WHAT WE DID:
One of the ambitions of iMagination week is to foster transdisciplinarity as a scientific and intellectual posture to understand the complexity of the modern world and the present. The idea is that students can nourish their responsible project by learning new knowledge, whatever its origin.
Credit: Xavier Pavie
2. One cannot predict the future. However, based on existing trends, we can detect and predict possible scenarios. For instance, in the 80’s the sequencing of DNA showed us the start of Bio hacking and Human bioengineering that we see rise in the most recent year. In a similar fashion, numerous books and comic books from 1957 to the 9O's surfaced some of our modern society realities: rise of individualism, consequences of technological advances and nature of consciousness and identity.
The idea of this methodology was to support students in defining the different realities that could happen in the future. Instead of telling them what the parameters were, the key learnings here was to ensure students were able to support themselves in establishing the parameters they think they will be working on in future years.
The start of the programme was inspired by methods such as Scenario Forecasting, Trends forecasting and ViP methods! Later on, tools from coaching, philosophy and human centered design, completed the tool box.
3. Together with our clients, we established the specifications of the tools needed for a dual experience across two continents with over 950 students that would enable content productivity and collaboration. We advise them on various online tools (Mural, Miro, Klaxxon, Comcast, Teams, Hopin, etc.) that would enable the students to produce the best outcomes and help the program achieve its broader mission.
4. Lastly, we established a training program on both the method and the tech tools to bring all our coaches onboard. Equipping them was key to the overall success of iMagination Week!
Key takeaways by the students:
The critical mind which aims to open dialogue, debate, take philosophy into account, become aware of what motivates students, grasp a problematic situation and find its root, its cause.
The posture of curiosity : this involves developing active listening, researching and integrating comments, checking whether the idea already exists and whether it is the case to solve it in a more creative, transdisciplinary and original way .
Collaboration : it is about building a team, knowing how to take a leadership role and supporting others in their own leadership role and their own ideas. You have to be able to deliver an insightful and powerful message, and to work on digital collaborative tools. Then share feedback in a constructive way.
Creativity : Individual creativity and collective creativity, to avoid group thinking. Ideally to build an idea by combining several ideas. The advantage of having a diversity of points of view in a team makes it possible to build a stronger idea.
Key Takeaway for the Hybrid Model:
With “work from home” being our new normal, a Gartner survey of company leaders found that 80% plan to allow employees to work remotely at least part of the time after the pandemic, and 47% will allow employees to work from home full-time. In a PwC survey of 669 CEOs, 78% agree that remote collaboration is here to stay for the long-term. Due to safe distancing rules, through this programme, we explored an onsite and off site approach where out of the 5 coaches present - 3 were onsite and 2 were online. Similarly with the students, ⅔ were onsite and ⅓ were online. This programme gives students a taste of what it will be like to work during this pandemic.
