Erin Young Post 5: Summing Up

        This class presented me with the challenge of thinking from the customer's perspective while simultaneously considering the economic benefits of my team's innovation. I think one of my greatest struggles is with patience, which often resulted in me becoming attached to an idea early on in our research process that would later turn out to be infeasible. Our team initially chose shopping malls because they had great potential for improvement. We had an idea brainstorm before announcing our topic where we discussed how we might create an entirely virtual mall. However, once our research results were in, we found that consumers longed for an in-person social space to shop rather than a more stylized online shopping experience. What I saw as a great idea was not necessarily what profitable customers were looking for and I needed to accept this. Letting go of this idea was a challenge for me and I was glad to have the opportunity to accept this.

    One of the most valuable skills I learned during this experience was the ability to be open and receptive to new ideas, no matter how out there they may seem. When our team was working on idea generation, I looked at our post-it notes and questioned whether some of them could be done, like having a collection of thrift stores as our mall. I thought that this would prevent a diverse shopping space. However, these ideas contributed to the team's creativity by pushing us to think of similar, more feasible ideas. We may not have followed through with the thrift shop idea, but the thought of selling vintage clothing led to our focus on handmade or higher-quality products. Our class exercises also encouraged creative thinking as we often had to make quick adjustments when discussing our ideas with the rest of the class, presented with challenges we might not have considered without their feedback. Meeting with our professor also prompted us to further consider our ideas which encouraged us to elaborate on new concepts. I think this course helped me to be a quicker thinker and brainstormer, contributing to my creative process.

    I enjoyed this class for its unconventional structure and focus on imaginative constructions. As an English major, I find myself more interested in human reasoning and ideas rather than concrete problems like algebra. Brainstorming the structure of our shopping mall was a lot more fun than planning the funding or construction costs would have been. It also resulted in a much more interesting concept without the restrictions of zoning and other factors we did not have to consider.

    Working on the same team for the whole semester could be challenging as we needed to stick together and collaborate through successes and failures. There were often outside conflicts that made it harder for our group to meet, but we persevered and supported each other where we could. I think our time together resulted in strong bonds being formed as we better understood each other and our strengths. One of my group members was artistically inclined and took on the role of drawing and graphic design for our prototypes, which we would not have discovered without one discussion before class time where he talked about his interest in pop art.

    Overall, I enjoyed the class for its creative process and consideration of human imagination as a tool in the business world. I do wish we had more opportunities to switch our concept since making our commitment to malls so early in the semester was a difficult choice, but I understand that we needed to proceed with our projects at that moment. I'm happy with the skills I gained in this course and look forward to applying them in the future.