problem solving related to innovation

Five routes to more innovative problem solving

Rob McEwen had a problem. The chairman and chief executive officer of Canadian mining group Goldcorp knew that its Red Lake site could be a money-spinner—a mine nearby was thriving—but no one could figure out where to find high-grade ore. The terrain was inaccessible, operating costs were high, and the unionized staff had already gone on strike. In short, McEwen was lumbered with a gold mine that wasn’t a gold mine .

Then inspiration struck. Attending a conference about recent developments in IT, McEwen was smitten with the open-source revolution. Bucking fierce internal resistance, he created the Goldcorp Challenge: the company put Red Lake’s closely guarded topographic data online and offered $575,000 in prize money to anyone who could identify rich drill sites. To the astonishment of players in the mining sector, upward of 1,400 technical experts based in 50-plus countries took up the problem. The result? Two Australian teams, working together, found locations that have made Red Lake one of the world’s richest gold mines. “From a remote site, the winners were able to analyze a database and generate targets without ever visiting the property,” McEwen said. “It’s clear that this is part of the future.” 1 1. See Linda Tischler, “ He struck gold on the Net (really) ,” fastcompany.com, May 31, 2002.

McEwen intuitively understood the value of taking a number of different approaches simultaneously to solving difficult problems. A decade later, we find that this mind-set is ever more critical: business leaders are operating in an era when forces such as technological change and the historic rebalancing of global economic activity from developed to emerging markets have made the problems increasingly complex, the tempo faster, the markets more volatile, and the stakes higher. The number of variables at play can be enormous, and free-flowing information encourages competition, placing an ever-greater premium on developing innovative, unique solutions.

This article presents an approach for doing just that. How? By using what we call flexible objects for generating novel solutions, or flexons , which provide a way of shaping difficult problems to reveal innovative solutions that would otherwise remain hidden. This approach can be useful in a wide range of situations and at any level of analysis, from individuals to groups to organizations to industries. To be sure, this is not a silver bullet for solving any problem whatever. But it is a fresh mechanism for representing ambiguous, complex problems in a structured way to generate better and more innovative solutions.

The flexons approach

Finding innovative solutions is hard. Precedent and experience push us toward familiar ways of seeing things, which can be inadequate for the truly tough challenges that confront senior leaders. After all, if a problem can be solved before it escalates to the C-suite, it typically is. Yet we know that teams of smart people from different backgrounds are more likely to come up with fresh ideas more quickly than individuals or like-minded groups do. 2 2. Lu Hong and Scott Page, “Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America , 2004, Volume 101, pp. 16385–89. For more on the benefits of open innovation, see John Seely Brown and John Hagel III, “ Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation ,” McKinsey Quarterly , May 2006. When a diverse range of experts—game theorists to economists to psychologists—interact, their approach to problems is different from those that individuals use. The solution space becomes broader, increasing the chance that a more innovative answer will be found.

Obviously, people do not always have think tanks of PhDs trained in various approaches at their disposal. Fortunately, generating diverse solutions to a problem does not require a diverse group of problem solvers. This is where flexons come into play. While traditional problem-solving frameworks address particular problems under particular conditions—creating a compensation system, for instance, or undertaking a value-chain analysis for a vertically integrated business—they have limited applicability. They are, if you like, specialized lenses. Flexons offer languages for shaping problems, and these languages can be adapted to a much broader array of challenges. In essence, flexons substitute for the wisdom and experience of a group of diverse, highly educated experts.

To accommodate the world of business problems, we have identified five flexons, or problem-solving languages. Derived from the social and natural sciences, they help users understand the behavior of individuals, teams, groups, firms, markets, institutions, and whole societies. We arrived at these five through a lengthy process of synthesizing both formal literatures and the private knowledge systems of experts, and trial and error on real problems informed our efforts. We don’t suggest that these five flexons are exhaustive—only that we have found them sufficient, in concert, to tackle very difficult problems. While serious mental work is required to tailor the flexons to a given situation, and each retains blind spots arising from its assumptions, multiple flexons can be applied to the same problem to generate richer insights and more innovative solutions.

Networks flexon

Imagine a map of all of the people you know, ranked by their influence over you. It would show close friends and vague acquaintances, colleagues at work and college roommates, people who could affect your career dramatically and people who have no bearing on it. All of them would be connected by relationships of trust, friendship, influence, and the probabilities that they will meet. Such a map is a network that can represent anything from groups of people to interacting product parts to traffic patterns within a city—and therefore can shape a whole range of business problems.

For example, certain physicians are opinion leaders who can influence colleagues about which drugs to prescribe. To reveal relationships among physicians and help identify those best able to influence drug usage, a pharmaceutical company launching a product could create a network map of doctors who have coauthored scientific articles. By targeting clusters of physicians who share the same ideas and (one presumes) have tight interactions, the company may improve its return on investments compared with what traditional mass-marketing approaches would achieve. The network flexon helps decompose a situation into a series of linked problems of prediction (how will ties evolve?) and optimization (how can we maximize the relational advantage of a given agent?) by presenting relationships among entities. These problems are not simple, to be sure. 3 3. For more on network analysis, see Robert L. Cross, Roger D. Martin, and Leigh M. Weiss, “ Mapping the value of employee collaboration ,” McKinsey Quarterly , August 2006. For more on the role of brokers in filling organizational gaps, see Ronald S. Burt, Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition , first edition, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. But they are well-defined and structured—a fundamental requirement of problem solving.

Evolutionary flexon

Evolutionary algorithms have won games of chess and solved huge optimization problems that overwhelm most computational resources. Their success rests on the power of generating diversity by introducing randomness and parallelization into the search procedure and quickly filtering out suboptimal solutions. Representing entities as populations of parents and offspring subject to variation, selection, and retention is useful in situations where businesses have limited control over a large number of important variables and only a limited ability to calculate the effects of changing them, whether they’re groups of people, products, project ideas, or technologies. Sometimes, you must make educated guesses, test, and learn. But even as you embrace randomness, you can harness it to produce better solutions to complex problems.

That’s because not all “guessing strategies” are created equal. We have crucial choices to make: generating more guesses (prototypes, ideas, or business models) or spending more time developing each guess or deciding which guesses will survive. Consider a consumer-packaged-goods company trying to determine if a new brand of toothpaste will be a hit or an expensive failure. Myriad variables—everything from consumer habits and behavior to income, geography, and the availability of clean water—interact in multiple ways. The evolutionary flexon may suggest a series of low-cost, small-scale experiments involving product variants pitched to a few well-chosen market segments (for instance, a handful of representative customers high in influence and skeptical about new ideas). With every turn of the evolutionary-selection crank, the company’s predictions will improve.

Decision-agent flexon

To the economic theorist, social behavior is the outcome of interactions among individuals, each of whom tries to select the best possible means of achieving his or her ends. The decision-agent flexon takes this basic logic to its limit by providing a way of representing teams, firms, and industries as a series of competitive and cooperative interactions among agents. The basic approach is to determine the right level of analysis—firms, say. Then you ascribe to them beliefs and motives consistent with what you know (and think they know), consider how their payoffs change through the actions of others, determine the combinations of strategies they might collectively use, and seek an equilibrium where no agent can unilaterally deviate from the strategy without becoming worse off.

Game theory is the classic example, but it’s worth noting that a decision-agent flexon can also incorporate systematic departures from rationality: impulsiveness, cognitive shortcuts such as stereotypes, and systematic biases. Taken as a whole, this flexon can describe all kinds of behavior, rational and otherwise, in one self-contained problem-solving language whose most basic variables comprise agents (individuals, groups, organizations) and their beliefs, payoffs, and strategies.

For instance, financial models to optimize the manufacturing footprint of a large industrial company would typically focus on relatively easily quantifiable variables such as plant capacity and input costs. To take a decision-agent approach, you assess the payoffs and likely strategies of multiple stakeholders—including customers, unions, and governments—in the event of plant closures. Adding the incentives, beliefs, and strategies of all stakeholders to the analysis allows the company to balance the trade-offs inherent in a difficult decision more effectively.

System-dynamics flexon

Assessing a decision’s cascading effects on complex businesses is often a challenge. Making the relations between variables of a system, along with the causes and effects of decisions, more explicit allows you to understand their likely impact over time. A system-dynamics lens shows the world in terms of flows and accumulations of money, matter (for example, raw materials and products), energy (electrical current, heat, radio-frequency waves, and so forth), or information. It sheds light on a complex system by helping you develop a map of the causal relationships among key variables, whether they are internal or external to a team, a company, or an industry; subjectively or objectively measurable; or instantaneous or delayed in their effects.

Consider the case of a deep-sea oil spill, for example. A source (the well) emits a large volume of crude oil through a sequence of pipes (which throttle the flow and can be represented as inductors) and intermediate-containment vessels (which accumulate the flow and can be modeled as capacitors). Eventually, the oil flows into a sink (which, in this case, is unfortunately the ocean). A pressure gradient drives the flow rate of oil from the well into the ocean. Even an approximate model immediately identifies ways to mitigate the spill’s effects short of capping the well. These efforts could include reducing the pressure gradient driving the flow of crude, decreasing the loss of oil along the pipe, increasing the capacity of the containment vessels, or increasing or decreasing the inductance of the flow lines. In this case, a loosely defined phenomenon such as an oil spill becomes a set of precisely posed problems addressable sequentially, with cumulative results.

Information-processing flexon

When someone performs long division in her head, a CEO makes a strategic decision by aggregating imperfect information from an executive team, or Google servers crunch Web-site data, information is being transformed intelligently. This final flexon provides a lens for viewing various parts of a business as information-processing tasks, similar to the way such tasks are parceled out among different computers. It focuses attention on what information is used, the cost of computation, and how efficiently the computational device solves certain kinds of problems. In an organization, that device is a collection of people, whose processes for deliberating and deciding are the most important explanatory variable of decision-making’s effectiveness. 4 4. See Dan Lovallo and Olivier Sibony, “ The case for behavioral strategy ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 2010.

Consider the case of a private-equity firm seeking to manage risk. A retrospective analysis of decisions by its investment committee shows that past bets have been much riskier than its principals assumed. To understand why, the firm examines what information was transmitted to the committee and how decisions by individuals would probably have differed from those of the committee, given its standard operating procedures. Interviews and analysis show that the company has a bias toward riskier investments and that it stems from a near-unanimity rule applied by the committee: two dissenting members are enough to prevent an investment. The insistence on near-unanimity is counterproductive because it stifles debate: the committee’s members (only two of whom could kill any deal) are reluctant to speak first and be perceived as an “enemy” by the deal sponsor. And the more senior the sponsor, the more likely it is that risky deals will be approved. Raising the number of votes required to kill deals, while clearly counterintuitive, would stimulate a richer dialogue.

Putting flexons to work

We routinely use these five problem-solving lenses in workshops with executive teams and colleagues to analyze particularly ambiguous and complex challenges. Participants need only a basic familiarity with the different approaches to reframe problems and generate more innovative solutions. Here are two quite different examples of the kinds of insights that emerge from the use of several flexons, whose real power emerges in combination.

Reorganizing for innovation

A large biofuel manufacturer that wants to improve the productivity of its researchers can use flexons to illuminate the problem from very different angles.

Networks. It’s possible to view the problem as a need to design a better innovation network by mapping the researchers’ ties to one another through co-citation indices, counting the number of e-mails sent between researchers, and using a network survey to reveal the strength and density of interactions and collaborative ties. If coordinating different knowledge domains is important to a company’s innovation productivity, and the current network isn’t doing so effectively, the company may want to create an internal knowledge market in which financial and status rewards accrue to researchers who communicate their ideas to co-researchers. Or the company could encourage cross-pollination by setting up cross-discipline gatherings, information clearinghouses, or wiki-style problem-solving sites featuring rewards for solutions.

Evolution. By describing each lab as a self-contained population of ideas and techniques, a company can explore how frequently new ideas are generated and filtered and how stringent the selection process is. With this information, it can design interventions to generate more varied ideas and to change the selection mechanism. For instance, if a lot of research activity never seems to lead anywhere, the company might take steps to ensure that new ideas are presented more frequently to the business-development team, which can provide early feedback on their applicability.

Decision agents. We can examine in detail how well the interests of individual researchers and the organization are aligned. What financial and nonfinancial benefits accrue to individuals who initiate or terminate a search or continue a search that is already under way? What are the net benefits to the organization of starting, stopping, or continuing to search along a given trajectory? Search traps or failures may be either Type I (pursuing a development path unlikely to reach a profitable solution) or Type II (not pursuing a path likely to reach a profitable solution). To better understand the economics at play, it may be possible to use industry and internal data to multiply the probabilities of these errors by their costs. That economic understanding, in turn, permits a company to tailor incentives for individuals to minimize Type I errors (by motivating employees to reject apparent losers more quickly) or Type II errors (by motivating them to persist along paths of uncertain value slightly longer than they normally would).

Predicting the future

Now consider the case of a multinational telecommunications service provider that operates several major broadband, wireless, fixed, and mobile networks around the world, using a mix of technologies (such as 2G and 3G). It wants to develop a strategic outlook that takes into consideration shifting demographics, shifting technologies for connecting users with one another and with its core network (4G), and shifting alliances—to say nothing of rapidly evolving players from Apple to Qualcomm. This problem is complicated, with a range of variables and forces at work, and so broad that crafting a strategy with big blind spots is easy. Flexons can help.

Each view of the world described below provides valuable food for thought, including potential strategic scenarios, technology road maps, and possibilities for killer apps. More hard work is needed to synthesize the findings into a coherent worldview, but the different perspectives provided by flexons illuminate potential solutions that might otherwise be missed.

Decision agents. Viewing the problem in this way emphasizes the incentives for different industry players to embrace new technologies and service levels. By enumerating a range of plausible scenarios from the perspective of customers and competitors, the network service provider can establish baseline assessments of future pricing, volume levels, and investment returns.

Networks. This lens allows a company or its managers to look at the industry as a pattern of exchange relationships between paying customers and providers of services, equipment, chips, operating systems, and applications, and then to examine the properties of each exchange network. The analysis may reveal that not all innovations and new end-user technologies are equal: some provide an opportunity for differentiation at critical nodes in the network; others do not.

System dynamics. This flexon focuses attention on data-flow bottlenecks in applications ranging from e-mail and voice calls to video downloads, games, and social-networking interactions. 5 5. The information-processing flexon, which focuses attention on the computational tasks required to give users access to assured data streams, is also relevant for evaluating bottlenecks and facilitating predictions about how networks and operators will fare in the future. The company can build a network-optimization map to predict and optimize capital expenditures for network equipment as a function of expected demand, information usage, and existing constraints. Because cost structures matter deeply to annuity businesses (such as those of service providers) facing demand fluctuations, the resulting analysis may radically affect which services a company believes it can and cannot offer in years to come.

Flexons help turn chaos into order by representing ambiguous situations and predicaments as well-defined, analyzable problems of prediction and optimization. They allow us to move up and down between different levels of detail to consider situations in all their complexity. And, perhaps most important, flexons allow us to bring diversity inside the head of the problem solver, offering more opportunities to discover counterintuitive insights, innovative options, and unexpected sources of competitive advantage.

Olivier Leclerc is a principal in McKinsey’s Southern California office. Mihnea Moldoveanu is associate dean of the full-time MBA program at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, where he directs the Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking.

Explore a career with us

Related articles.

The case for behavioral strategy

Mapping the value of employee collaboration

Creation nets: Getting the most from open innovation

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

Drive Innovation with Better Decision-Making

• Linda A. Hill,
• Emily Tedards,

Despite their embrace of agile methods, many firms striving to innovate are struggling to produce breakthrough ideas. A key culprit, according to the authors, is an outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making. Today’s discovery-driven innovation processes involve an unprecedented number of choices, from which ideas to pursue to countless decisions about how to conduct experiments, what data to collect, and so on. But these choices are often made too slowly and informed by obsolete information and narrow perspectives.

To align their decision-making processes with agile approaches, businesses need to include diverse (customer, local, data-informed, and outside) points of view; clarify decision rights; match the cadence of decisions to the pace of learning; and encourage candid conflict in service of a better experience for the end customer. Only then will all that rapid experimentation pay off.

The article suggests best practices for these interventions, drawing on the story of the transformation at Pfizer’s Global Clinical Supply, which would go on to play a critical role supporting the rapid development of the pharma giant’s Covid vaccine.

Don’t let old habits undermine your organization’s creativity.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

Despite their embrace of agile and lean methodologies, many organizations looking to become more innovative are still struggling to move quickly on new ideas. That’s often because of their outdated, inefficient approach to decision-making.

The Research

Over the past two decades the authors have worked with innovative companies across the globe, most recently focusing on incumbent firms that were transforming themselves into nimbler businesses, to learn what key challenges they faced and how they addressed them.

The Solution

Businesses need to strengthen and speed up their creative decision-making processes by including diverse perspectives, clarifying decision rights, matching the cadence of decisions to the pace of learning, and encouraging candid, robust conflict in service of a better experience for the end customer. Only then will all that rapid experimentation pay off.

To stay competitive, today’s business leaders are investing millions in digital tools, agile methodologies, and lean strategies. Too often, however, those efforts produce neither the breakthrough operational processes nor the blockbuster business models companies need—at least not before their competitors introduce their own advances. And a key culprit is the inability to make quick and effective innovation decisions.

• Linda A. Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, the author of Becoming a Manager , and a coauthor of Being the Boss and Collective Genius .
• Emily Tedards is a doctoral student at Harvard Business School in the Organizational Behavior Unit.
• TS Taran Swan is a managing partner at Paradox Strategies, a provider and creator of advisory services, experiences, and tools that enable organizations to navigate the paradoxes of leadership, innovation, and diversity.

Partner Center

• Back to All Programs /

Creative Thinking: Innovative Solutions to Complex Challenges

Learn how to grow a culture of creativity to innovate competitive solutions.

All Start Dates

8:30 AM – 4:30 PM ET

2 consecutive days

Registration Deadline

May 28, 2024

October 8, 2024

Overview: Creative Thinking Skills Course

The tech breakthrough that makes smartphones irrelevant, a new viral ad campaign, your company’s next big revenue generator — ideas like these could be sitting in your brain; all you need are the creative thinking skills and strategies to pull them out.

This interactive program focuses explicitly on the creative thinking skills you need to solve complex problems and design innovative solutions. Learn how to transform your thinking from the standard “why can’t we” to the powerful “how might we.” Crack the code on how to consistently leverage your team’s creative potential in order to drive innovation within your organization. Explore how to build a climate for innovation, remove barriers to creativity, cultivate courage, and create more agile, proactive, and inspired teams.

You will leave this program with new ideas about how to think more productively and how to introduce creative thinking skills into your organization. You can apply key takeaways immediately to implement a new leadership vision, inspire renewed enthusiasm, and enjoy the skills and tools to tackle challenges and seize opportunities.

Innovation experts Anne Manning and Susan Robertson bring to this highly-interactive and powerful program their decades of experience promoting corporate innovation, teaching the art of creative problem solving, and applying the principles of brain science to solve complex challenges.

Who Should Take Creative Thinking Skills Training?

This program is ideal for leaders with at least 3 years of management experience. It is designed for leaders who want to develop new strategies, frameworks, and tools for creative problem solving. Whether you are a team lead, project manager, sales director, or executive, you’ll learn powerful tools to lead your team and your organization to create innovative solutions to complex challenges.

All participants will earn a Certificate of Participation from the Harvard Division of Continuing Education.

Benefits of Creative Thinking Skills Training

The goal of this creative thinking program is to help you develop the strategic concepts and tactical skills to lead creative problem solving for your team and your organization. You will learn to:

• Retrain your brain to avoid negative cognitive biases and long-held beliefs and myths that sabotage creative problem solving and innovation
• Become a more nimble, proactive, and inspired thinker and leader
• Create the type of organizational culture that supports collaboration and nurtures rather than kills ideas
• Gain a practical toolkit for solving the “unsolvable” by incorporating creative thinking into day-to-day processes
• Understand cognitive preferences (yours and others’) to adapt the creative thinking process and drive your team’s success
• Develop techniques that promote effective brainstorming and enable you to reframe problems in a way that inspires innovative solutions

The curriculum in this highly interactive program utilizes research-based methodologies and techniques to build creative thinking skills and stimulate creative problem solving.

Through intensive group discussions and small-group exercises, you will focus on topics such as:

• The Creative Problem Solving process: a researched, learnable, repeatable process for uncovering new and useful ideas. This process includes a “how to” on clarifying, ideating, developing, and implementing new solutions to intractable problems
• The cognitive preferences that drive how we approach problems, and how to leverage those cognitive preferences for individual and team success
• How to develop—and implement— a methodology that overcomes barriers to innovative thinking and fosters the generation of new ideas, strategies, and techniques
• The role of language, including asking the right questions, in reframing problems, challenging assumptions, and driving successful creative problem solving
• Fostering a culture that values, nurtures, and rewards creative solutions

Considering this program?

Send yourself the details.

Related Programs

• Design Thinking: Creating Better Customer Experiences
• Agile Leadership: Transforming Mindsets and Capabilities in Your Organization

June Schedule

• Creative Challenges: A Team Sport
• The Place to Begin: Reframe the Challenge
• Ideas on Demand
• Building a Creative Organization

October Schedule

Instructors, anne manning, susan robertson, certificates of leadership excellence.

The Certificates of Leadership Excellence (CLE) are designed for leaders with the desire to enhance their business acumen, challenge current thinking, and expand their leadership skills.

This program is one of several CLE qualifying programs. Register today and get started earning your certificate.

Harvard Division of Continuing Education

The Division of Continuing Education (DCE) at Harvard University is dedicated to bringing rigorous academics and innovative teaching capabilities to those seeking to improve their lives through education. We make Harvard education accessible to lifelong learners from high school to retirement.

Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship pp 1492–1506 Cite as

Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Theory

• Boris Zlotin 2 &
• Alla Zusman 2  
• Reference work entry
• First Online: 24 October 2020

80 Accesses

1 Citations

Systematic innovation

Introduction

How people invent? Famous scientists and engineers sharing their memories, as well as psychologists studying the creativity process, describe similar situations: An individual facing a difficult problem is mentally exploring various approaches, persistently trying and rejecting ideas until the right one comes. Psychologists call this process trial-and-error method (T&EM).

T&EM has a great history. It was used to create first stone knives, bows, guns, windmills, building, ships, and almost everything we can see around. Some results are astonishing: Polynesian catamarans, old Chinese, Norwegian, or Russian boats are practically perfect. Each element has the best shape. However, archeological research has shown that even 500 years ago, these vessels were rather far from perfect. One hundred years after another of repeating practically the same shapes, the builders yet were introducing slight changes into design. Some of them were unsuccessful,...

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution .

Buying options

• Available as PDF
• Read on any device
• Instant download
• Own it forever
• Available as EPUB and PDF
• Durable hardcover edition
• Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
• Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Altshuller G. Creativity as an exact science. New York: Gordon and Breach; 1984 (Russian edition 1979).

Google Scholar  

Altshuller G. And suddenly the inventor appeared: TRIZ, the theory of inventive problem solving. Worchester: Technical Innovation Center; 1996 (Translated by Lev Shulyak).

Altshuller G. The innovation algorithm. Worcester: Technical Innovation Center; 1999 (First Russian edition 1969).

ARIZ-85c: Altshuller G, Zlotin B, Philatov V. The profession of searching for new ideas. Kishinev: Kartya Moldovenyaska Publishing House; 1985 (In Russian).

Higgins JM. 101 Creative problem solving techniques. Winter Park: New Management Publishing Company; 1994.

Ideation International (1995, 2001, 2004). Ideation Methodology course material: introduction to the Ideation Methodology. Ideation International Inc.; 1995–2005.

John Dubuc. Ideation International 2010, Dubuc J. Accelerating continuous innovation. Presented in Orlando; 2010.

Kaplan S. An introduction to TRIZ, the Russian theory of inventive problem solving. Southfield: Ideation International; 1996.

Terninko J, Zlotin B, Zusman A. Systematic innovation: an introduction to TRIZ. Boca Raton: St. Lucie Press; 1998.

Book   Google Scholar  

Zlotin B, Zusman A. An integrated operational knowledge base. In: TRIZ in progress. Southfield: Ideation International; 1999a. p. 114–22.

Zlotin B, Zusman A. Managing innovation knowledge. In: TRIZ in progress. Southfield: Ideation International; 1999b. p. 123–40.

Zlotin B, Zusman A, Kaplan L, Visnepolschi S, Proseanic V, Malkin S. TRIZ beyond technology. The theory and practice of applying TRIZ to non-technical areas. In: Proceedings of TRIZCON 2000; 2000. p. 135–76.

Zlotin B, Zusman A, Fulbright R. Knowledge based tools for software supported innovation and problem solving. In: Altshuller’s TRIZ Institute Conference TRIZCON 2010, Detroit; 29–30 Nov 2010.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Ideation International Inc., Farmington Hills, MI, USA

Boris Zlotin & Alla Zusman

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Boris Zlotin .

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of Information Systems and Technology, Management, European Union Research Center, GWU School of Business, The George Washington University, Washington, DC, USA

Elias G. Carayannis

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this entry

Cite this entry.

Zlotin, B., Zusman, A. (2020). Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), Theory. In: Carayannis, E.G. (eds) Encyclopedia of Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15347-6_36

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15347-6_36

Published : 24 October 2020

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-319-15346-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-319-15347-6

eBook Packages : Business and Management Reference Module Humanities and Social Sciences Reference Module Business, Economics and Social Sciences

Share this entry

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Publish with us

Policies and ethics

• Find a journal
• Track your research

Unlocking Creativity: Techniques for Innovative Problem-Solving

Introduction

Creativity and innovation are essential skills for solving problems in any domain. Whether you are facing a personal, professional, or social challenge, thinking creatively and innovatively can help you find unique solutions and improve your outcomes. In this post, you will learn about the nature of creativity and innovation, the barriers preventing you from unleashing your creative potential, and the techniques to help you unlock your creativity and apply it to real-life challenges. You will also discover how to cultivate a creative mindset to enhance your well-being and performance in various aspects of life.

Understanding Creativity and Innovation

Creativity is the ability to generate novel and valuable ideas to solve problems or meet needs. Innovation is the process of implementing those ideas into products, services, or practices that create value. Creativity and innovation are closely related but not identical. You can be creative without being innovative, and vice versa. However, when you combine creativity and innovation, you can achieve remarkable results that can transform your situation and the world around you.

Creativity and innovation have many benefits for individuals and organizations. For example, creativity and innovation can help you:

• Enhance your problem-solving skills and find better solutions
• Increase your productivity and efficiency
• Boost your confidence and self-esteem
• Stimulate your curiosity and learning
• Foster your adaptability and resilience
• Improve your communication and collaboration
• Generate more opportunities and growth

Barriers to Creativity

Despite the importance and benefits of creativity and innovation, many people struggle to express their creative potential. Many factors can hinder your creative thinking and problem-solving abilities. Some of the common barriers to creativity are:

• Fear of failure: The fear of making mistakes, being rejected, or facing criticism can paralyze your creative efforts. You may avoid taking risks, trying new things, or sharing your ideas with others.
• Rigid thinking: The tendency to stick to familiar patterns, assumptions, or rules can limit your creative options. You may rely on conventional wisdom, follow the status quo, or repeat what has worked before.
• Self-criticism: The habit of judging yourself harshly or comparing yourself to others can undermine your creative confidence. You may doubt your abilities, censor your thoughts, or dismiss your ideas as worthless.

These barriers can be internal or external, conscious or unconscious. They can originate from yourself, others, or the environment. They can affect you at any creative process stage, from generating ideas to implementing solutions.

To overcome these barriers, you need to recognize them, challenge them, and replace them with more positive and supportive attitudes and behaviors.

Techniques for Unlocking Creativity

Many techniques can help you unlock your creativity and generate innovative solutions. Here are some of the most effective ones:

Mind Mapping

Mind mapping is a technique that helps you organize your thoughts visually using keywords, images, colors, and connections. It enables you to generate ideas by stimulating both sides of your brain: the logical left and the creative right.

To create a mind map, follow these steps:

• Start with a central topic or problem in the middle of a blank page.
• Draw branches from the central topic to represent subtopics or aspects of the problem.
• Draw sub-branches from each branch to represent more specific details or ideas.
• Use keywords, symbols, images, or colors to label each branch or sub-branch.
• Connect related branches or sub-branches with lines or curves.
• Keep adding branches or sub-branches until you have exhausted all possible ideas.

You can use mind mapping to explore different aspects of a problem, generate multiple solutions, or organize your thoughts into a coherent structure.

For example, if you want to write a blog post about unlocking creativity, you can use mind mapping to brainstorm possible topics, subtopics, examples, sources, etc.

Here is an example of a mind map for writing a blog post about unlocking creativity:

Unlocking Creativity

|—Understanding Creativity

|   |

|   |—Definition

|   |—Benefits

|   |—Examples

|—Barriers to Creativity

|   |—Fear of Failure

|   |—Rigid Thinking

|   |—Self-Criticism

|—Techniques for Unlocking Creativity

|   |—Mind Mapping

|   |—Brainstorming

|   |—Lateral Thinking

|   |—SCAMPER Technique

|   |—Storyboarding

|—Cultivating a Creative Mindset

|   |—Curiosity

|   |—Open-Mindedness

|   |—Embracing Failures

|   |—Mindfulness

|   |—Diverse Experiences

|   |—Continuous Learning

|—Applying Creativity to Real-Life Challenges

|   |—Personal Problems

|   |—Professional Problems

|   |—Social Problems

|—Conclusion

|   |—Summary

|   |—Importance

|   |—Encouragement

|—Additional Resources

    |

    |—Books

    |—Online Courses

    |—Tools

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a technique that helps you generate many ideas in a short time, either individually or in a group. It helps you overcome mental blocks and expand your creative horizons.

To conduct a brainstorming session, follow these steps:

• Define the problem or goal clearly and concisely.
• Set a time limit and a target number of ideas.
• Write down or record every idea that comes to mind without judging, filtering, or evaluating them.
• Encourage wild, crazy, or unusual ideas.
• Build on, combine, or modify existing ideas.
• After the time is up, review and categorize the ideas.
• Select the most promising ideas for further development or testing.

You can use brainstorming to explore different angles of a problem, generate diverse and original solutions, or stimulate your creative thinking.

For example, if you want to create a new product or service that can help people unlock their creativity, you can use brainstorming to come up with possible ideas.

Here are some examples of brainstorming ideas for creating a new product or service that can help people unlock their creativity:

• A mobile app that provides daily creative challenges and feedback.
• A subscription box that delivers different creative materials and instructions every month.
• An online platform that connects people with creative mentors and peers.
• A wearable device that tracks and enhances your brain activity and mood.
• A board game that tests and improves your creative skills and knowledge.
• A podcast that features interviews and stories of creative people and experts.
• A book that teaches you how to apply creativity to any problem or goal.
• A workshop that guides you through various creative techniques and exercises.

Lateral Thinking

Lateral thinking is a technique that helps you think “outside the box” by unconventionally using logic. It enables you to break free from fixed patterns, assumptions, or rules and find new perspectives, connections, or possibilities.

To practice lateral thinking, follow these steps:

• Identify the problem or situation that you want to improve or change.
• Challenge the existing assumptions, beliefs, or facts that underlie the problem or situation.
• Generate alternative ways of looking at the problem or situation using questions, analogies, metaphors, paradoxes, etc.
• Evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of the alternative ways of looking at the problem or situation.
• Choose the most suitable form of looking at the problem or situation and apply it to find a solution or improvement.

You can use lateral thinking to find innovative solutions, discover new opportunities, or create novel products or services.

For example, if you want to increase the sales of your online store, you can use lateral thinking to find new ways of attracting and retaining customers.

Here are some examples of lateral thinking questions and answers for increasing the sales of your online store:

• Question: What if you could sell your products without using money?
• Answer: You could create a bartering system where customers can exchange their products or services for yours.
• Question: What if you could sell your products without using words?
• Answer: You could use images, videos, sounds, or emotions to showcase your products.
• Question: What if you could sell your products without using a website?
• Answer: You could use social media, email, chatbots, or voice assistants to communicate with your customers.

SCAMPER Technique

SCAMPER is an acronym for seven creative techniques that help you modify existing products, services, or processes to create new ones. It stands for:

• Substitute: Replace one part of something with another part.
• Combine: Join two or more parts of something together.
• Adapt: Change something to suit a new purpose or situation.
• Modify: Alter something in size, shape, color, etc.
• Put to another use: Use something for a different function than its original one.
• Eliminate: Remove one part of something completely.
• Reverse: Change the order, direction, or perspective of something.

To use the SCAMPER technique, follow these steps:

• Select an existing product, service, or process you want to improve or change.
• Ask yourself questions using each of the seven techniques to generate new ideas.
• Evaluate the feasibility and usefulness of the new ideas.
• Choose and implement the best idea to create a new or improved product, service, or process.

You can use the SCAMPER technique to modify existing products, services, or processes to create new ones that are more innovative, efficient, or attractive.

For example, if you want to create a new or improved coffee maker, you can use the SCAMPER technique to generate new ideas.

Here are some examples of SCAMPER questions and answers for creating a new or improved coffee maker:

• Substitute: What can you replace in the coffee maker to make it better?
• Answer: You can replace the water tank with a reusable water bottle that can be attached and detached easily.
• Combine: What can you combine with the coffee maker to add more value or functionality?
• Answer: You can combine the coffee maker with a toaster to toast bread or bagels while brewing coffee.
• Adapt: How can you adapt the coffee maker to suit different needs or preferences?
• Answer: You can adapt the coffee maker to brew different types of coffee, such as espresso, cappuccino, latte, etc.
• Modify: How can you change the shape, size, color, or design of the coffee maker to make it more appealing or convenient?
• Answer: You can change the shape of the coffee maker to make it more compact and portable so that you can take it anywhere.
• Put to another use: How can you use the coffee maker for a different purpose than its original one?
• Answer: You can use the coffee maker as a water heater or a steamer for cooking or cleaning purposes.
• Eliminate: What can you remove from the coffee maker to simplify it or reduce costs?
• Answer: You can remove the power cord from the coffee maker and make it battery-operated or solar-powered.
• Reverse: How can you reverse the coffee maker’s order, direction, or perspective to create a new effect or benefit?
• Answer: You can reverse the direction of the coffee maker and make it dispense cold brew coffee instead of hot coffee.

Storyboarding

Storyboarding is a technique that helps you visualize your ideas or solutions using sketches, drawings, or images. It enables you to communicate your ideas clearly and effectively and test and refine them.

To create a storyboard, follow these steps:

• Define the problem or goal that you want to solve or achieve.
• Break down your solution or process into critical steps or stages.
• Draw a series of frames illustrating each step or stage of your solution or process.
• Add captions, dialogues, notes, or annotations to each frame to explain what is happening.
• Review and revise your storyboard until you are satisfied with it.

You can use storyboarding to plan and present your ideas or solutions compellingly and engagingly.

For example, if you want to create a new app that helps people unlock their creativity, you can use storyboarding to show how your app works and benefits your users.

Here is an example of a storyboard for creating a new app that helps people unlock their creativity:

Frame 1 : A woman is sitting at her desk, looking bored and frustrated. She has a laptop in front of her and a blank document on her screen. She wants to write a blog post about creativity but has no idea what to write about. She says to herself: “I wish I could be more creative.”

Frame 2 : She sees an ad on her laptop saying, “Unlock your creativity with Creativio – the ultimate app for creative problem-solving.” She clicks on the ad and downloads the app on her phone.

Frame 3 : She opens the app and sees a welcome screen: “Welcome to Creativio – the ultimate app for creative problem-solving. Creativio helps you generate novel and useful ideas for any problem or goal. Whether you want to write a blog post, design a logo, invent a product, or solve a puzzle, Creativio has got you covered.”

Frame 4 : She taps on “Start” and sees a screen saying, “What do you want to do?” She types in “Write a blog post about creativity” and taps on “Next.”

Frame 5 : She sees a screen saying, “How do you want to generate ideas?” She chooses “Mind Mapping” from a list of options that include “Brainstorming,” “Lateral Thinking,” “SCAMPER Technique,” and “Storyboarding.”

Frame 6 : She sees a screen that shows her how to create a mind map using keywords, images, colors, and connections. She follows the instructions and creates a mind map for her blog post topic.

Frame 7 : She sees her completed mind map on her screen. She is amazed by how many ideas she has generated in just a few minutes. She says to herself: “Wow, this is awesome. I have so many ideas for my blog post now.”

Frame 8 : She transfers her mind map to her laptop and starts writing her blog post using her ideas. She is happy and excited. She says to herself: “Thank you, Creativio. You have unlocked my creativity.”

Cultivating a Creative Mindset

Unlocking your creativity is not a one-time event but a continuous process. You must cultivate a creative mindset supporting your innovative thinking and problem-solving to maintain and enhance your creativity.

A creative mindset is a set of attitudes and behaviors that foster your creative potential. Some of the key elements of a creative mindset are:

• Curiosity: The desire to learn new things, explore new possibilities, and ask questions.
• Open-mindedness: The willingness to consider different perspectives, opinions, and ideas.
• Embracing failures: The ability to accept and learn from mistakes, setbacks, and feedback.
• Mindfulness: The awareness of your thoughts, feelings, and sensations in the present moment.
• Diverse experiences: The exposure to different cultures, people, places, and situations.
• Continuous learning: The commitment to update your knowledge, skills, and abilities.

You can cultivate a creative mindset by practicing these elements regularly. For example, you can:

• Read books, watch videos, listen to podcasts, or attend events that spark your curiosity and interest.
• Seek feedback, collaborate with others, or join online communities that challenge your assumptions and broaden your horizons.
• Experiment with new ideas, take risks or try new things that test your limits and help you grow.
• Meditate, journal, or do yoga that helps you relax and focus on the present moment.
• Travel, volunteer, or participate in activities that expose you to different cultures, people, places, and situations.
• Take online courses, enroll in workshops, or learn new skills that expand your knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Applying Creativity to Real-life Challenges

Creativity is beneficial for artistic or academic purposes and for solving real-life challenges that you may face in your personal, professional, or social life. By applying the techniques and strategies you have learned in this post, you can find innovative solutions for any problem or goal you encounter.

Here are some examples of how you can apply creativity to real-life challenges:

• Creative solution: You use the SCAMPER technique to modify your diet and exercise routine. You substitute unhealthy foods with healthier alternatives. You combine different types of exercises to make your workout more fun and effective. You adapt your schedule to fit in more physical activity. You modify your portion sizes and calorie intake. You put your food to another use by donating it to a food bank. You eliminate snacks and desserts from your diet. You reverse your eating habits and eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince, and dinner like a pauper.
• Creative solution: You use brainstorming to generate ideas for improving your team’s work environment and culture. You write down every idea that comes to mind without judging or filtering them. You encourage wild and crazy ideas from yourself and your team members. You build on or combine existing ideas to create new ones. You review and categorize the ideas based on their feasibility and usefulness. You select and implement the most promising ideas with your team’s input and feedback.
• Creative solution: You use storyboarding to plan and present your campaign for the social cause. You define the problem or goal that you want to solve or achieve. You break down your campaign into key steps or stages. You draw a series of frames that illustrate each step or stage of your campaign. You add captions, dialogues, notes, or annotations to each frame to explain what is happening. You review and revise your storyboard until you are satisfied with it. You share your storyboard with potential supporters and donors.

Creativity is a valuable skill that can help you solve problems and achieve goals in any domain of life. By understanding the nature of creativity and innovation, overcoming the barriers that prevent you from expressing your creative potential, using the techniques that can help you unlock your creativity, cultivating a creative mindset that supports your creative thinking and problem-solving, and applying creativity to real-life challenges that you face in your personal, professional, or social life, you can transform your situation and the world around you.

I hope this post has inspired you to start unlocking your creativity today. Remember that creativity is not a gift that only some people have; it is a skill anyone can learn and improve with practice.

So what are you waiting for? Start unlocking your creativity now!

Additional Resources

If you want to learn more about creativity and how to enhance it, here are some books, online courses, tools, or platforms that can help you:

• Thinkertoys ” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener sponsored”>Thinkertoys: A Handbook of Creative-Thinking Techniques  by Michael Michalko. This book offers a collection of practical and fun exercises that can help you generate and implement creative ideas
• Creative Confidence ” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener sponsored”>Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All  by Tom and David Kelley. This book shows how you can develop your creative confidence and apply it to any challenge or opportunity
• Art of Problem-Solving ” target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener sponsored”>The Art of Problem-Solving  by Russell L. Ackoff and Daniel Greenberg. This book explains how to approach problems from a systems perspective and find holistic solutions that address the root causes and not just the symptoms 3
• Effective Problem-Solving and Decision-Making  by University of California, Irvine. This course teaches you to use critical thinking, creativity, and analytical tools to solve problems and make decisions.
• Innovation Through Design: Think, Make, Break, Repeat  by The University of Sydney. This course introduces you to the design thinking process and how to use it for innovation and problem-solving.
• Solving Complex Problems  by Macquarie University. This course helps you develop the skills and mindset to tackle complex problems that require interdisciplinary and collaborative approaches.
• MindMeister . This online tool allows you to create and share mind maps with others. You can use it to brainstorm, organize, and present your ideas visually.+
• Canva . This online platform enables you to create stunning graphics, logos, posters, flyers, and more. You can use it to express your ideas visually and attractively.

Related articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

There was a problem reporting this post.

Block Member?

Please confirm you want to block this member.

You will no longer be able to:

• See blocked member's posts
• Mention this member in posts
• Invite this member to groups
• Message this member
• Add this member as a connection

Please note: This action will also remove this member from your connections and send a report to the site admin. Please allow a few minutes for this process to complete.

• Business Essentials
• Leadership & Management
• Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• *New* Digital Transformation
• Finance & Accounting
• Business in Society
• For Organizations
• Support Portal
• Media Coverage
• Founding Donors
• Leadership Team

• Harvard Business School →
• HBS Online →
• Business Insights →

Business Insights

Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

• Career Development
• Communication
• Decision-Making
• Earning Your MBA
• Negotiation
• News & Events
• Productivity
• Staff Spotlight
• Student Profiles
• Work-Life Balance
• Alternative Investments
• Business Analytics
• Business Strategy
• Business and Climate Change
• Design Thinking and Innovation
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Disruptive Strategy
• Economics for Managers
• Entrepreneurship Essentials
• Financial Accounting
• Global Business
• Launching Tech Ventures
• Leadership Principles
• Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
• Leading with Finance
• Management Essentials
• Negotiation Mastery
• Organizational Leadership
• Power and Influence for Positive Impact
• Strategy Execution
• Sustainable Business Strategy
• Sustainable Investing
• Winning with Digital Platforms

Why Problem-Solving Skills Are Essential for Leaders in Any Industry

• 17 Jan 2023

Any organization offering a product or service is in the business of solving problems.

Whether providing medical care to address health issues or quick convenience to those hungry for dinner, a business’s purpose is to satisfy customer needs .

In addition to solving customers’ problems, you’ll undoubtedly encounter challenges within your organization as it evolves to meet customer needs. You’re likely to experience growing pains in the form of missed targets, unattained goals, and team disagreements.

Yet, the ubiquity of problems doesn’t have to be discouraging; with the right frameworks and tools, you can build the skills to solve consumers' and your organization’s most challenging issues.

Here’s a primer on problem-solving in business, why it’s important, the skills you need, and how to build them.

Access your free e-book today.

What Is Problem-Solving in Business?

Problem-solving is the process of systematically removing barriers that prevent you or others from reaching goals.

Your business removes obstacles in customers’ lives through its products or services, just as you can remove obstacles that keep your team from achieving business goals.

Design Thinking

Design thinking , as described by Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar in the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , is a human-centered , solutions-based approach to problem-solving and innovation. Originally created for product design, design thinking’s use case has evolved . It’s now used to solve internal business problems, too.

The design thinking process has four stages :

• Clarify: Clarify a problem through research and feedback from those impacted.
• Ideate: Armed with new insights, generate as many solutions as possible.
• Develop: Combine and cull your ideas into a short list of viable, feasible, and desirable options before building prototypes (if making physical products) and creating a plan of action (if solving an intangible problem).
• Implement: Execute the strongest idea, ensuring clear communication with all stakeholders about its potential value and deliberate reasoning.

Using this framework, you can generate innovative ideas that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise.

Creative Problem-Solving

Another, less structured approach to challenges is creative problem-solving , which employs a series of exercises to explore open-ended solutions and develop new perspectives. This is especially useful when a problem’s root cause has yet to be defined.

You can use creative problem-solving tools in design thinking’s “ideate” stage, which include:

• Brainstorming: Instruct everyone to develop as many ideas as possible in an allotted time frame without passing judgment.
• Divergent thinking exercises: Rather than arriving at the same conclusion (convergent thinking), instruct everyone to come up with a unique idea for a given prompt (divergent thinking). This type of exercise helps avoid the tendency to agree with others’ ideas without considering alternatives.
• Alternate worlds: Ask your team to consider how various personas would manage the problem. For instance, how would a pilot approach it? What about a young child? What about a seasoned engineer?

It can be tempting to fall back on how problems have been solved before, especially if they worked well. However, if you’re striving for innovation, relying on existing systems can stunt your company’s growth.

Related: How to Be a More Creative Problem-Solver at Work: 8 Tips

Why Is Problem-Solving Important for Leaders?

While obstacles’ specifics vary between industries, strong problem-solving skills are crucial for leaders in any field.

Whether building a new product or dealing with internal issues, you’re bound to come up against challenges. Having frameworks and tools at your disposal when they arise can turn issues into opportunities.

As a leader, it’s rarely your responsibility to solve a problem single-handedly, so it’s crucial to know how to empower employees to work together to find the best solution.

Your job is to guide them through each step of the framework and set the parameters and prompts within which they can be creative. Then, you can develop a list of ideas together, test the best ones, and implement the chosen solution.

Related: 5 Design Thinking Skills for Business Professionals

4 Problem-Solving Skills All Leaders Need

1. problem framing.

One key skill for any leader is framing problems in a way that makes sense for their organization. Problem framing is defined in Design Thinking and Innovation as determining the scope, context, and perspective of the problem you’re trying to solve.

“Before you begin to generate solutions for your problem, you must always think hard about how you’re going to frame that problem,” Datar says in the course.

For instance, imagine you work for a company that sells children’s sneakers, and sales have plummeted. When framing the problem, consider:

• What is the children’s sneaker market like right now?
• Should we improve the quality of our sneakers?
• Should we assess all children’s footwear?
• Is this a marketing issue for children’s sneakers specifically?
• Is this a bigger issue that impacts how we should market or produce all footwear?

While there’s no one right way to frame a problem, how you do can impact the solutions you generate. It’s imperative to accurately frame problems to align with organizational priorities and ensure your team generates useful ideas for your firm.

To solve a problem, you need to empathize with those impacted by it. Empathy is the ability to understand others’ emotions and experiences. While many believe empathy is a fixed trait, it’s a skill you can strengthen through practice.

When confronted with a problem, consider whom it impacts. Returning to the children’s sneaker example, think of who’s affected:

• Your organization’s employees, because sales are down
• The customers who typically buy your sneakers
• The children who typically wear your sneakers

Empathy is required to get to the problem’s root and consider each group’s perspective. Assuming someone’s perspective often isn’t accurate, so the best way to get that information is by collecting user feedback.

For instance, if you asked customers who typically buy your children’s sneakers why they’ve stopped, they could say, “A new brand of children’s sneakers came onto the market that have soles with more traction. I want my child to be as safe as possible, so I bought those instead.”

When someone shares their feelings and experiences, you have an opportunity to empathize with them. This can yield solutions to their problem that directly address its root and shows you care. In this case, you may design a new line of children’s sneakers with extremely grippy soles for added safety, knowing that’s what your customers care most about.

Related: 3 Effective Methods for Assessing Customer Needs

3. Breaking Cognitive Fixedness

Cognitive fixedness is a state of mind in which you examine situations through the lens of past experiences. This locks you into one mindset rather than allowing you to consider alternative possibilities.

For instance, your cognitive fixedness may make you think rubber is the only material for sneaker treads. What else could you use? Is there a grippier alternative you haven’t considered?

Problem-solving is all about overcoming cognitive fixedness. You not only need to foster this skill in yourself but among your team.

4. Creating a Psychologically Safe Environment

As a leader, it’s your job to create an environment conducive to problem-solving. In a psychologically safe environment, all team members feel comfortable bringing ideas to the table, which are likely influenced by their personal opinions and experiences.

If employees are penalized for “bad” ideas or chastised for questioning long-held procedures and systems, innovation has no place to take root.

By employing the design thinking framework and creative problem-solving exercises, you can foster a setting in which your team feels comfortable sharing ideas and new, innovative solutions can grow.

How to Build Problem-Solving Skills

The most obvious answer to how to build your problem-solving skills is perhaps the most intimidating: You must practice.

Again and again, you’ll encounter challenges, use creative problem-solving tools and design thinking frameworks, and assess results to learn what to do differently next time.

While most of your practice will occur within your organization, you can learn in a lower-stakes setting by taking an online course, such as Design Thinking and Innovation . Datar guides you through each tool and framework, presenting real-world business examples to help you envision how you would approach the same types of problems in your organization.

Are you interested in uncovering innovative solutions for your organization’s business problems? Explore Design Thinking and Innovation —one of our online entrepreneurship and innovation courses —to learn how to leverage proven frameworks and tools to solve challenges. Not sure which course is right for you? Download our free flowchart .

About the Author

• Open access
• Published: 05 February 2018

The role of problem solving ability on innovative behavior and opportunity recognition in university students

• Ji Young Kim 1 ,
• Dae Soo Choi 1 ,
• Chang-Soo Sung 1 &
• Joo Y. Park 2  

Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity volume  4 , Article number:  4 ( 2018 ) Cite this article

24k Accesses

30 Citations

1 Altmetric

Metrics details

Universities engage in entrepreneurship education to increase social value creation, through students’ new opportunities recognition. However, there are not enough of empirical researches on whether the current entrepreneurship education can be differentiated from other curriculum to improve the opportunity recognition process. This study argues that it is very important for cognitive abilities to be manifested as behavior when students in university are new opportunities recognition. For this purpose, the relationship between problem solving ability, innovation behavior, and opportunity perception was verified empirically. This study was conducted on 203 students who took entrepreneurship education courses at Korean universities. The results of this study showed that problem solving ability positively influenced innovation behavior and opportunity perception. Innovation behavior was identified as a key parameter that partially mediated the relationship between problem solving ability and innovation behavior. The implication of this study is to prove the relationship between individual ‘s problem - solving ability considering the characteristics of education in Korea and the opportunity through innovative behavior and various learning strategies to help entrepreneurship education to design better courses for the future It has important implications for strategic pedagogy that can enhance behavioral elements in development.

It is the new opportunity recognition that all firms focus on for a new economic paradigm (Ancona and Caldwell, 1992 ). Recognizing high opportunities can significantly improve profit, growth, and / or competitive positioning. And this new opportunity leads to innovation. From a conceptual point of view, research is continuing on the question of ‘what is opportunity’ and ‘where is opportunity’ (Gartner and Carter, 2003 ; Venkataraman & Sarasvathy, 2001 ). Research on the discovery and realization of new opportunities is a very important research area that suggests how to discover and utilize creative opportunities that create new value and profit for pre-service workers, and is the ultimate goal of entrepreneurship education. (Kim et al., 2016 ). Particularly, there is a lot of debate about the relationship between opportunity perception and personal characteristics. Despite many arguments, however, research on individual characteristics and opportunity perceptions is still insufficient, and a unified opinion has not been created due to differences between cognitive and behavioral theories (Ko & Butler, 2003 ). In particular, there is much controversy over the relationship between opportunity recognition and personal traits, and research has been continuing to demonstrate that organizational learning in organizations can influence opportunity recognition (Shane & Venkataraman, 2000 ). In particular, learning enhances cognitive ability, which is an opportunity that leads to opportunity recognition through the manifestation of behavior (Lumpkin and Dess, 2004 ). Many studies have also demonstrated the difference in behavior that successful entrepreneurs see as contributing to their ability to recognize opportunities and create innovative business ideas (Dyer et al., 2008 ; Kim et al., 2017 ). For example, Alvarez and Barney ( 2005 ) argue for mountain climbing and mountain building to understand the implications of entrepreneurial behavior in relation to these theories. In other words, a new opportunity for entrepreneurs is not a passive case that is generally found and climbed by climbers such as mountains, but rather by the actions of entrepreneurs, creating competition for the market, creating another market, Is the same. Therefore, in order for a person’s cognitive ability to recognize a new opportunity, it must focus on manifesting an action that can realize an innovative idea. In this regard, Kanter ( 1988 ) proved the relationship between new opportunity recognition and those with innovative tendencies and regarded this new opportunity recognition as innovation activity through organizational education. Scott and Bruce ( 1994 ) have integrated a number of research flows into innovation pioneers to develop and test individual innovative behavioral models. In particular, they argued that individual problem-solving styles are very important to induce innovative behavior. Although there are a number of studies on problem solving ability, innovation behavior, and new opportunities, most of the opportunistic researches have been conducted in organizational units of companies. Is still insufficient. Furthermore, unified opinions were not created due to differences between cognitive theory and behavioral theory (Ko & Butler, 2003 ). It is also true that the effects of entrepreneurship education in university have not been studied empirically because they are mainly focused on promoting cognitive ability and applied to various kinds of teaching methods.

This study argues that it is very important for cognitive abilities to be manifested as behavior that. “Through” courses, In other words, it is very important to induce students to act through ‘learning through process’ learning through behavioral learning by providing students with some (virtual or real) business to start doing some of the actions of the entrepreneur. When students in university are new opportunity recognition. Especially, entrepreneurship education, which ultimately focuses on whether it is a new opportunity, is very important to induce behavior through behavior learning beyond the cognitive ability as the general education curriculum. Particularly, innovative behaviors that create and realize innovative ideas are very important for new opportunity recognition (Paine & Organ, 2000 ).In order to achieve this, various kinds of teaching methods are being pursued in the university, but studies on the effectiveness of behavioral learning have not been studied yet. In this study, we are based on team-based learning among various teaching methods for behavior learning that leads to innovative behaviors. Team learning instructional activity sequence designed by Michaelsen and Sweet ( 2008 ), the most well known team-based learning in entrepreneurship education as in class-primarily group work and outside class-primarily individual work. In this way, we demonstrate empirically the relationship between individual problem solving ability and opportunity through innovative behavior, and develop a variety of learning strategies that help entrepreneurship education to design better courses for the future. I would like to point out some implications for strategic pedagogy to increase the element.

The paper proceeds as follows: Initially we present the theory of innovative behavior with individual problem-solving ability, innovative behavior and opportunity recognition. We develop hypotheses to confirm its basic predictions in the student context. Finally, we link the findings with the wider social effect of entrepreneurship literature and highlight the theoretical contributions and practical implications.

Theoretical background

‘opportunity recognition’ as entrepreneurship education unit of analysis.

A commonly focused analysis in entrepreneurship research over the last 30 years has been the ‘opportunity’, most simply defined as any situation in which new products or services can be development of production (Casson, 1982 ; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000 ; Venkataraman, 1997 ). The definition of opportunity recognition is defined in many ways, but opportunity is defined as a perceived means of generating economic value (ie, profit) that has not been exploited previously and is not currently exploited by others. If opportunity is defined in this way, opportunity recognition can be defined as a cognitive process (or process) that concludes that an individual has identified an opportunity (Baron and Ensley, 2006 ). Kirzner ( 1997 ) pointed out that the distribution of information in society affects the discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities and that only a few individuals can identify and recognize specific opportunities in the market. The process of finding opportunities also depends on the individual’s ability and discovery (Stevenson & Gumpert, 1985 ). For example, people may miss opportunities due to a lack of cognitive ability to change external environments (Stevenson & Gumpert, 1985 ). Only those who recognize and value the existence of opportunity can benefit from new opportunities (Ardichvili et al., 2003a , b ; Shane & Venkataraman, 2000 ). Opportunity recognition is an early step in transforming value into a business concept that creates value and generates revenue and distinguishes it from the aggressive stages of detailed assessment and development of recognized opportunities and potential economic value. The focus of the new venture business is also an innovative opportunity to create new opportunities rather than merely expanding or repeating existing business models (Gaglio & Katz, 2001 ). As a result, universities need to make use of a variety of initiatives to educate students to recognize innovative opportunities. Therefore, entrepreneurship education aimed at a new opportunity recognition should be able to provide learning opportunities based on various theories of favorable conditions for new business creation and the types of traits required for new ventures (Garavan & O’Cinne’ide, 1994 ).

Based on these considerations, we also define opportunity recognition as the formation of beliefs that can be translated into actions in order to understand the signals of change (new information on new conditions) and respond to these changes.

Problem-solving ability and innovative behavior of education for students

Problem-solving abilities have been proven to be one of the key factors for success in organizations and personal careers (Anderson & Anderson 1995 ). Through decades of research data, organizations and schools have studied factors that affect improvement. Problem-solving abilities are defined in a number of prior studies, and problem-solving abilities in a volatile and sophisticated knowledge- and technology-based industry are an important ability to drive innovation and sustainable growth and development in the industry. Table  1 show the concept of problem solving ability defined in previous research.

There have been a number of previous studies, emphasis has been placed on the importance and meaning of rational problem-solving processes in order to improve problem-solving abilities, and research has focused on individual problem solving styles (Woodman et al., 1993 ; Scott & Bruce, 1994 ). According to the personal innovation behavior model of Scott and Bruce ( 1994 ), climate has shown individual innovative behavior as a result of individuals signaling the organization’s expectations of behavior and the potential consequences of action. Innovative organizations are, last but not least, equipment, facilities and time, including the direction of creativity and innovative change (Kanter, 1983 ; Siegel & Kaemmerer, 1978 ) Proper supply of such resources is important to innovation (Amabile, 1988 ; Van de Ven & Angle, 1989 ; Dubickis & Gaile-Sarkane, 2017 ). Based on a study of Koestler’s ( 1964 ) creative thinking, Jabri conceptualized a problem-solving style consisting of two independent thinking styles. He uses a structured problem-solving styles that is based on associative thinking, follows a set of rules, resolves reasonably logically, and uses an intuitive problem-solving ability that focuses on problem-solving, not tied to existing rules with multiple ideas. Intuitive problem solving styles tend to process information from different paradigms simultaneously. It is therefore more likely to create new problem solutions as possible (Isaksen, 1987 ; Kirton, 1976 ). However, style assessment is not desirable because the style of problem solving affects style differently depending on the individual problem-solving situations (Scott & Bruce, 1994 ). We are proposing a role for the University to encourage innovative behavior based on the individuality of our students in order to recognize new opportunities through education about Scott and Bruce’s innovative behavioral models and diverse entrepreneurship education approaches. And involvement of resources, such as entrepreneurship awareness programs, ultimately leads to the identification of individual characteristics and innovation. In addition, current Korean entrepreneurship education is mainly focused on cognitive learning to improve problem solving ability, and one aspect of cognitive learning plays an important role in learning process of new venture firms. This study has a more direct focus on behavior learning such as team-based learning.

Hypothesis development

Problem-solving ability and innovative behavior.

Problem solving is to discover knowledge and skills that reach the target country by interfering with a set of processes and goals where the solution is unknown, unfamiliar, or reaching a new state of goal (Jonassen, 2004 ; Inkinen, 2015 ). There are various approaches to solve this problem. To solve problems and improve problem solving with a successful solution experience, you should adopt the method that best suits your problem solution. You need to select the appropriate inputs for the solution elements and a flexible process structure. Problem solving ability has been recognized as a key element of innovative behavior in responding to rapid changes with the ability to find various alternatives and predict outcomes from these alternatives to maximize positive results, minimize negative consequences, and select solutions to problems (Barron & Harrington, 1981 ; Jabri, 1991 ; Kirton, 1976 ). We pose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1: Individual problem-solving ability has an effect on the innovative behavior of students.

Innovative behavior and opportunity recognition

Innovation involves introducing ideas from outside the organization, through creative processes, and linking these ideas to products or processes. Many scholars studying innovation recognize that designing ideas is only one step in the innovation process (Kanter, 1988 ). Innovation is changing at the organizational or individual level. Kanter, Scott and Bruce defined personal innovation. In other words, an innovation act starts with recognition of a problem, adoption of a new idea, or creation of a solution, and an individual with an innovative tendency wants to create a realistically realizable group with the sympathy of such an idea. Innovative individuals create prototypes for innovations that enable ideas to be realized specifically with goods or services and become productive use and social day merchandising. According to previous studies, opportunity perception can be seen as an individual’s corporate strategy that focuses on the perception and exploitation of individuals about potential business ideas and opportunities and finds resources to create innovative outcomes (Manev et al., 2005 ). New Venture Ideas (NVI) are imaginary combinations of product/service offerings; potential markets or users, and means of bringing these offerings into existence (Davidsson, 2015 ). From the viewpoint of a potential entrepreneur like a university student, entrepreneurship starts with an idea. This process continues with a range of practices including attractiveness and feasibility of an idea, gathering information to minimize value-related uncertainty and possibility and perhaps the main idea’s conformity ratio in terms of newly discovered needs (Hayton & Cholakova, 2012 ). Earlier we proposed that the program as a whole increases the students’ innovative behavior and that innovative performance is the new venture ideas. Since it is logical to assume that the relationship between innovative behavior and opportunity recognition. We pose the following hypotheses:

Hypothesis 2: Innovative behavior will be a more potent inducer of opportunity recognition.

Problem-solving ability and opportunity recognition

Among the many factors influencing opportunity perception, the problems that arise in the fourth industry, the knowledge-based industry of the twenty-first century, are unpredictable and unstructured; they cannot be solved with existing solutions and require creative problem-solving skills. In order to determine how to solve problem situations that are different from the current situation and have unknown results, problems are solved through the process of adjusting previous experience, knowledge, and intuition (Charles & Lester, 1982 ). Experience, knowledge, and intuition are applied simultaneously to a single problem, not individually or collectively, and the intellectual and creative results that can be quickly and effectively solved in problem solving are seen as problem solving abilities (Ardichvili et al., 2003a , b ). Empirical studies of problem-solving abilities and opportunity perceptions have provided strong evidence that there is a positive relationship between theoretical integrative processes and corporate opportunity recognition (Ucbasaran et al., 2009 ). Therefore, we hypothesized that:

Hypothesis 3: Problem solving ability has an effect on the opportunity recognition.

The respondents for this study were randomly selected from three universities in Korea. Most of the respondents in this study were Korean university students who experienced team-based learning during behavioral learning through entrepreneurship education. Since then, we have been guided by two main criteria when choosing these universities. First, students who take entrepreneurship courses are critical to their innovation behavior. This led us to realize that innovative behavior is an important factor in an individual’s survival and growth. The second is that the parallel process of theoretical and behavioral learning is highly satisfied. A pilot study was conducted to verify the reliability and validity of the research measurements with 28 students at a university. The results of the pilot study showed high clarity and reliability (Cronbach ‘s alphas were all above 0.70) ​​of the research measurements. The sample of the pilot study was not incorporated in the present study.

This study was conducted in a four - year undergraduate course (various majors) that took entrepreneurship courses in Korea university programs. Students in this course have a mix of students who have previously experienced entrepreneurship and those who have not. During the course, students were taught the theoretical lessons for 8 weeks and the team for the 8 weeks. The questionnaire was administered during the last week of the course.

The data were analyzed from 203 participants, out of a total of 209, of which 7 were not appropriate. Of the 203 participants, 27% were female and 73% were male and the grade distribution was 3% for freshmen, 12% for grade 2, 26% for grade 2, and 59% for grade 2. The main distribution is 26% in social science, 16% in business and economics, 39% in engineering, 11% in music and athletics and 7% in others (see Table  2 ).

Measurement

The structure of the model was measured by questionnaires (problem-solving ability, innovation behavior and opportunity recognition questionnaire) consisting of the scale taken from questionnaires verified in previous studies. Tool selection was performed on two criteria. First, the selected tool should measure the same structure (ie, the original measured structure had to be conceptually identical to the way the structure was defined in this study model). Secondly, the psychometric qualities of the instrument for the student had to be high.

Assessment of the factors was carried out through principal component analyses (varimax rotation with eigenvalues of 1.0 or above) of the scales connected to the same level of the model to confirm the uniqueness of the scales with respect to each other. This was supplemented by the computation of the internal consistency reliability of the scales (Cronbach’s α). These analyses were executed using the individual participants’ responses (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994 ).

Problem- solving ability was measured on a 7-point Likert-scale (1 = ‘completely disagree’; 7 = ‘completely agree’). Jabri ( 1991 ) used a measurement tool to measure individual problem solving ability.

Innovative behavior was measured on a 7-point Likert-scale (1 = ‘completely disagree’; 7 = ‘completely agree’). In order to measure innovation behavior, we modified the questionnaire items to fit the intention of this study among the questionnaire items used by Scott and Bruce ( 1994 ) and Kim and Rho ( 2010 ).

Opportunity recognition was measured on a 7-point Likert-scale (1 = ‘completely disagree’; 7 = ‘completely agree’). In order to measure opportunity recognition, we modified the questionnaire items to fit the intention of this study among the questionnaire items used by Kim and Rho ( 2010 ).

Methods of analysis

The first two parts of the analysis were primarily based on (multiple) regression analyses. The last part of the analysis was informed through the path analyses. The adequacy of the models was assessed by AMOS 18(Arbuckle & Wothke, 2003 ). Models were all tested with standardized coefficients obtained from the Principal Component Analysis. To ascertain the model fit, we analyzed the comparative fit index (CFI), the normed fit index (NFI), the Root Mean Square Err of Approximation (RMSEA), the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) and the chi-square test statistic.

Reliability and validity are essential psychometrics to be reported. The first step to evaluate those aspects was to use the Cronbach’s alpha and the composite reliability to test reliability of the proposed scales. The usual threshold level is 0.7 for newly developed measures (Fornell and Larcker, 1981 ). Values range from 0.69 to 0.79 in the case of Cronbach’s alpha, and from 0.85 to 0.92 in the case of composite reliability (see Table  3 ). Therefore, these scales may be considered as reliable. Next, we estimated the research model, displayed in Fig.  1 , using structural equation modeling (SEM) and AMOS 18 (Arbuckle & Wothke, 2003 ). Our analysis revealed an adequate measurement model with high factor loadings for all the items on the expected factors and communalities of each item exceeding 0.50. We discuss three fit indices that are generally considered as important (Hu & Bentler, 1998 ). First, the CFI-value represents the overall difference between observed and predicted correlations. A value of 0.04 which is situated well below the cut-off value of 0.08, suggests that the hypothesized model resembles the actual correlations. Secondly, Bentler’s CFI (comparative fit index) greater than 0.90 and 0.95 which is above the cut-off of 0.90 (Schumacker & Lomax, 1996 ). Thirdly, NFI greater greater than 0.90 and 0.95 which is above the cut-off of 0.90 (Schumacker & Lomax, 1996 ). Fourthly, the standardized root mean square residual (SRMR) value of 0.0392 which is situated well below the cut-off value of 0.05(Hu & Bentler, 1998 ), and the chi-square value of 3581.622 which is situated well below the cut-off value of 0.0005. Finally, the RMSEA (root mean square error of approximation) equals 0.04 with a 90% confidence interval between 0.03 and 0.05.

Analysis of mediation effect

The value and confidence interval are situated over but below the cut-off value of 0.1 which suggests not a great but a good fit. Factor analysis was verified by factor analysis using principal component analysis and only factors with an eigenvalue of 1 or more by orthogonal rotation method were selected. Factor loading was considered to be significant at 0.5 or more (Hair et al., 2006a , b ). As a result of the analysis, cumulative explanation for 72.4% of the total variance. Confirmatory factor analysis thus supported the differentiation of the three components Also we tested the confirmatory validity of the construct by testing whether the structural linkage of each square is greater than the mean variance extraction (AVE) of each structure. The AVE ranged from 0.52 to 0.53, reaching the recommended level of .50 for both Fornell and Larcker ( 1981 ). Therefore, all constructs showed sufficient convergent validity (see Table 3 ).

As shown in Table  4 , the AVE value of each variable has a higher value than that of other factors. Therefore, the discriminant validity of the proposed model can be judged as appropriate.

Means, standard deviations, and correlations among the study variables are shown in Table  5 .

The mean scores for the conceptual model were as follows for problem-solving ability (MD. 5.20, SD.1.08), innovative behavior (MD.5.20, SD.1.03), and opportunity recognition (MD. 5.14, SD. 1.06) conditions. The means of problem-solving ability, innovative behavior, and opportunity recognition were high. Furthermore, those variables correlated positively with each other.

Figure  1 showed that all paths and their significance levels are presented in Table  6 . The path between the latent variables problem-solving ability and innovative behavior was significant (p, 0.001), consistent with Hypotheses 1. In addition, there was innovative behavior and opportunity recognition (p, 0.01), this result provide empirical support for Hypothesis 2.

H3 proposed that Problem-solving ability is positively related to opportunity recognition. The results of the correlation analysis: The coefficient of problem solving and opportunity perception weakened from .717 to .444, but it is still partly mediated because it is still significant (C. R  = 7.604 ***). This supports H3 (see Table 6 ).

In order to verify the significance of the indirect effect, the bootstrapping must be performed in AMOS, and the actual significance test should be identified using two-tailed significance. As a result, the significance of indirect effect is 0.04 ( p  < 0.05), which is statistically significant (see Table  7 ).

Discussion and conclusion

We have tried to demonstrate the effects of behavior and its significance by differentiating from the general curriculum emphasizing cognitive effects as a model of problem solving ability emerging as innovative behavior through opportunity of university entrepreneurship education.. This supports the premise that entrepreneurship education can improve opportunities or processes through behavioral learning. The results of this study support the role of entrepreneurship education in creating opportunities for innovative behavior and problem solving abilities. Entrepreneurship education should provide different types of learning for new opportunities and focus on what is manifested in behavior.

In addition, based on previous research, we propose whether the following contents are well followed and whether it is effective. First, the emergence of innovative behavior in problem-solving abilities increases as the cognitive diversity of students with diverse majors and diverse backgrounds increases. Second, the more entrepreneurial learning experiences, the greater the chance of new opportunities. Third, it is necessary to investigate students’ problem solving style and problem-solving ability first, and then a teaching strategy based on this combination of systematic and effective theory and practice is needed. Of course, as demonstrated by many studies, it may be easier to enhance the effectiveness of opportunity recognition through cognitive learning. This is because it emphasizes the achievement of knowledge and understanding with acquiring skills and competence. This process, however, is not enough for entrepreneurship education. However, we do not support full team-based behavioral learning in the class designed by Michaelsen and Sweet ( 2008 ). As with the results of this study, problem solving ability is positively related to opportunity perception directly. As previously demonstrated in previous studies, problem solving ability can be enhanced by cognitive learning (Anderson et al., 2001 ; Charles & Lester, 1982 ).

Therefore, it has been demonstrated that it is more efficient to balance a certain level of cognitive learning and behavior learning in consideration of the level of students in a course. Also this study satisfies the need for empirical research by Lumpkin and Lichtenstein ( 2005 ) and Robinson et al. ( 2016 ) and others. This will help to improve understanding of how entrepreneurship training is linked to various learning models and their effectiveness and to design better courses for the future. Finally, this study sought to provide an awareness of entrepreneurship education as the best curriculum for solutions that evolved into innovative behaviors that create new values and ultimately represent new opportunities. This study shows that it can positively influence the social effect of creating new value, that is, not only the cognitive effect of general pedagogy, but also the innovation behavior. By providing this awareness, we have laid the groundwork for empirical research on entrepreneurship education in order to create more opportunities for prospective students in education through education and to expand their capabilities.

Limitation and future research

Indeed, the concepts presented here and the limitations of this study have important implications that can fruitfully be addressed in future research. First, we selected a sample of college students taking entrepreneurship training. However, since it is not the whole of Korean university students, it is difficult to extend the research results to all college students in Korea. Second, there is no precedent research on the role of innovation behavior as intermedia in college students. Therefore, we were forced to proceed as an exploratory study.

The ability to recognize opportunities can provide significant benefits that can remain firm and competitive in an ever-changing environment. Future research should therefore expand these insights and try to empirically test more ways in which entrepreneurship pedagogy teaches how learning methods can be integrated into venture creation and growth processes to help new process opportunities. By providing this study, we will help entrepreneurship education in the university to create more opportunities and expand the capacity of prospective members.

Alvarez, S. A., & Barney, J. B. (2005). How do entrepreneurs organize firms under conditions of uncertainty? Journal of Management, 31 (5), 776–793.

Article   Google Scholar  

Amabile, T. M. (1988). A model of creativity and innovation in organizations. Research in Organizational Behavior, 10 (1), 123–167.

Google Scholar  

Ancona, D. G., & Caldwell, D. F. (1992). Demography and design: Predictors of new product team performance. Organization Science, 3 (3), 321–341.

Anderson, P. M., & Anderson, P. M. (1995). Analysis of faulted power systems (Vol. 445). New York: IEEE press.

Anderson, L. W., Krathwohl, D. R., Airasian, P., Cruikshank, K., Mayer, R., Pintrich, P., & Wittrock, M. (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching and assessing: A revision of Bloom’s taxonomy . New York: Longman Publishing.

Arbuckle, J. L., & Wothke, W. (2003). AMOS 5 user’s guide . Chicago: Smallwaters.

Ardichvili, A., Cardozo, R., & Ray, S. (2003a). A theory of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development. Journal of Business Venturing, 18 (1), 105–123.

Ardichvili, A., Cardozo, R., & Ray, S. (2003b). A theory of entrepreneurial opportunity identification and development. Journal of Business Venturing, 18 (1), 105–123.

Baron, R. A., & Ensley, M. D. (2006). Opportunity recognition as the detection of meaningful patterns: Evidence from comparisons of novice and experienced entrepreneurs. Management Science, 52 (9), 1331–1344.

Barron, F., & Harrington, D. M. (1981). Creativity, intelligence, and personality. Annual review of psychology, 32 (1), 439–476.

Casson, M. (1982). The entrepreneur: An economic theory . Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Charles, R., & Lester, F. (1982). Teaching problem solving: What, why & how . Palo Alto: Dale Seymour Publications.

Davidsson, P. (2015). Entrepreneurial opportunities and the entrepreneurship nexus: A re-conceptualization. Journal of Business Venturing, 30 (5), 674–695.

Dubickis, M., & Gaile-Sarkane, E. (2017). Transfer of know-how based on learning outcomes for development of open innovation. Journal of Open Innovation : Technology, market, and complexity , 3 (1), 4.

Dyer, J. H., Gregersen, H. B., & Christensen, C. (2008). Entrepreneur behaviors, opportunity recognition, and the origins of innovative ventures. Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal, 2 (4), 317–338.

D'zurilla, T. J., & Nezu, A. M. (1990). Development and preliminary evaluation of the social problem-solving inventory. Psychological Assessment: A Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2 (2), 156.

Fornell, C., & Larcker, D. F. (1981). Evaluating structural equation models with unobservable variables and measurement error. Journal of Marketing Research , 39–50.

Gaglio, C. M., & Katz, J. A. (2001). The psychological basis of opportunity identification: Entrepreneurial alertness. Small Business Economics, 16 (2), 95–111.

Garavan, T. N., & O’Cinneide, B. (1994). Entrepreneurship education and training programmes: A review and evaluation-part 1. Journal of European Industrial Training, 18 (8), 3–12.

Gartner, W. B., & Carter, N. M. (2003). Entrepreneurial behavior and firm organizing processes. In Handbook of entrepreneurship research (pp. 195–221). New Mexico: Springer US.

Hair, E., Halle, T., Terry-Humen, E., Lavelle, B., & Calkins, J. (2006a). Children's school readiness in the ECLS-K: Predictions to academic, health, and social outcomes in first grade. Early Childhood Research Quarterly, 21 (4), 431–454.

Hair, J. F., Black, W. C., Babin, B. J., Anderson, R. E., & Tatham, R. L. (2006b). Multivariate Data Analysis (6th ed.). Upper Saddle River: Pearson Education, Inc..

Hayton, J. C., & Cholakova, M. (2012). The role of affect in the creation and intentional pursuit of entrepreneurial ideas. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 36 (1), 41–68.

Hu, L. T., & Bentler, P. M. (1998). Fit indices in covariance structure modeling: Sensitivity to underparameterized model misspecification. Psychological Methods, 3 (4), 424.

Inkinen, T. (2015). Reflections on the innovative city: Examining three innovative locations in a knowledge bases framework. Journal of Open Innovation : Technolodgy, market. Complexity, 1 (1), 8.

Isaksen, S. G. (1987). Frontiers of creativity research: Beyond the basics. Bearly Ltd.

Jabri, M. M. (1991). The development of conceptually independent subscales in the measurement of modes of problem solving. Educational and Psychological Measurement, 51 (4), 975–983.

Jonassen, D. H. (2004). Learning to solve problems: An instructional design guide (Vol. 6). Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons.

Kanter, R. M. (1983). The change masters: Binnovation and entrepreneturship in the American corporation. Touchstone Book.

Kanter, R. M. (1988). Three tiers for innovation research. Communication Research, 15 (5), 509–523.

Kim, H. C., Song, C. H., & An, B. R. (2016). A study on effects of personal characteristics on start-up opportunity and entrepreneurial intention of start-up. Korean Management Consulting review, 16 (3), 75–87.

Kim, S. A., Ryoo, H. Y., & Ahn, H. J. (2017). Student customized creative education model based on open innovation. Journal of Open Innovation : Technology, Market, and Complexity , 3 (1), 6.

Kim, T. H., & Roh, J. H. (2010). A Study of the Impact of Public Service Motivation on Innovative Behavior of Organizational Members. Korean Journal of Public Administration, 48(3).

Kirton, M. (1976). Adaptors and innovators: A description and measure. Journal of Applied Psychology, 61 (5), 622.

Kirzner, I. M. (1997). Entrepreneurial discovery and the competitive market process: An Austrian approach. Journal of Economic Literature, 35 (1), 60–85.

Ko, S., & Butler, J. E. (2003). Alertness, bisociative thinking ability, and discovery of entrepreneurial opportunities in Asian hi-tech firms.

Koestler, A. (1964). The act of creation: A study of the conscious and unconscious processes of humor, scientific discovery and art.

Lumpkin, G. T., & Dess, G. G. (2004). E-Business Strategies and Internet Business Models: How the Internet Adds Value. Organizational Dynamics, 33 (2), 161–173.

Lumpkin, G. T., & Lichtenstein, B. B. (2005). The role of organizational learning in the opportunity-recognition process. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 29 (4), 451–472.

Manev, I. M., Gyoshev, B. S., & Manolova, T. S. (2005). The role of human and social capital and entrepreneurial orientation for small business performance in a transitional economy. International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management, 5 (3–4), 298–318.

Michaelsen, L. K., & Sweet, M. (2008). The essential elements of team-based learning. New directions for teaching and learning, 2008 (116), 7–27.

Nunnally, J. C., & Bernstein, I. H. (1994). Validity. Psychometric theory, 99–132.

Paine, J. B., & Organ, D. W. (2000). The cultural matrix of organizational citizenship behavior: Some preliminary conceptual and empirical observations. Human Resource Management Review, 10 (1), 45–59.

Robinson, S., Neergaard, H., Tanggaard, L., & Krueger, N. F. (2016). New horizons in entrepreneurship education: from teacher-led to student-centered learning. Education+ Training, 58(7/8), 661–683.

Schumacker, R. E., & Lomax, R. G. (1996). A beginner's guide to structural equation modeling . Mahwah: Laurence Erlbaum Google Scholar.

Scott, S. G., & Bruce, R. A. (1994). Determinants of innovative behavior: A path model of individual innovation in the workplace. Academy of Management Journal, 37 (3), 580–607.

Shane, S. A. (2003). A general theory of entrepreneurship: The individual-opportunity nexus . Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.

Book   Google Scholar  

Shane, S., & Venkataraman, S. (2000). The promise of entrepreneurship as a field of research. Academy of Management Review, 25 (1), 217–226.

Siegel, S. M., & Kaemmerer, W. F. (1978). Measuring the perceived support for innovation in organizations. Journal of Applied Psychology, 63 (5), 553–562.

Spivack, G., Platt, J. J., & Shure, M. B. (1976). The problem-solving approach to adjustment . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Stevenson, H., & Gumpert, D. (1985). The heart of entrepreneurship.

Stevenson, H. H. & J. C. Jarillo (1990). 'A paradigm of entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurial management', Strategic Management Journal, 11, pp. 17–27.

Ucbasaran, D., Westhead, P., & Wright, M. (2009). The extent and nature of opportunity identification by experienced entrepreneurs. Journal of Business Venturing, 24 (2), 99–115.

Van de Ven, A. H., & Angle, H. L. (1989). Suggestions for managing the innovation journey (No. 9). Strategic Management Research Center, University of Minnesota.

Venkataraman, S. (1997). The distinctive domain of entrepreneurship research. Advances in entrepreneurship, firm emergence and growth, 3 (1), 119–138.

Venkataraman, S., & Sarasvathy, S. D. (2001). Strategy and entrepreneurship: Outlines of an untold story.

Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics. Public Culture, 14 (1), 49–90.

Woodman, R. W., Sawyer, J. E., & Griffin, R. W. (1993). Toward a theory of organizational creativity. Academy of Management Review, 18 (2), 293–321.

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Dept. of Technology Entrepreneurship (Graduate School), Dongguk University, 904 Chungmurogwn, Toegye-ro 36Gil, Jung-gu, Seoul, 100-272, South Korea

Ji Young Kim, Dae Soo Choi & Chang-Soo Sung

Yonsei School of Business, Yonsei University, 50 Yonsei-ro, Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, 120-749, South Korea

Joo Y. Park

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Joo Y. Park .

Ethics declarations

Publisher’s note.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Kim, J.Y., Choi, D.S., Sung, CS. et al. The role of problem solving ability on innovative behavior and opportunity recognition in university students. J. open innov. 4 , 4 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40852-018-0085-4

Download citation

Received : 12 September 2017

Accepted : 22 January 2018

Published : 05 February 2018

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s40852-018-0085-4

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

• Problem-solving ability
• Innovative behavior
• Opportunity recognition
• Entrepreneurship education

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Learn Health Syst
• v.6(2); 2022 Apr

Creativity in problem solving to improve complex health outcomes: Insights from hospitals seeking to improve cardiovascular care

Amanda l. brewster.

1 Health Policy and Management, School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley California, USA

Yuna S. H. Lee

2 Health Policy and Management, Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, New York New York, USA

Erika L. Linnander

3 Global Health Leadership Initiative, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven Connecticut, USA

Leslie A. Curry

4 Health Policy and Management, Yale School of Public Health, New Haven Connecticut, USA

Associated Data

Introduction.

Improving performance often requires health care teams to employ creativity in problem solving, a key attribute of learning health systems. Despite increasing interest in the role of creativity in health care, empirical evidence documenting how this concept manifests in real‐world contexts remains limited.

We conducted a qualitative study to understand how creativity was fostered during problem solving in 10 hospitals that took part in a 2‐year collaborative to improve cardiovascular care outcomes. We analyzed interviews with 197 hospital team members involved in the collaborative, focusing on work processes or outcomes that participants self‐identified as creative or promoting creativity. We sought to identify recurrent patterns across instances of creativity in problem solving.

Participants reported examples of creativity at both stages typically identified in problem solving research and practice: uncovering non‐obvious problems and finding novel solutions. Creativity generally involved the assembly of an “ecological view” of the care process, which reflected a more complete understanding of relationships between individual care providers, organizational sub‐units, and their environment. Teams used three prominent behaviors to construct the ecological view: (a) collecting new and diverse information, (b) accepting (rather than dismissing) disruptive information, and (c) employing empathy to understand and share feelings of others.

Conclusions

We anticipate that findings will be useful to researchers and practitioners who wish to understand how creativity can be fostered in problem solving to improve clinical outcomes and foster learning health systems.

1. INTRODUCTION

Improving performance often requires health care teams to employ creativity in problem solving, a key attribute of learning health systems. Creativity is defined the process of generating approaches that are both novel and useful. 1 , 2 Incorporating creativity into problem solving can help to address unique, site‐specific complexities that influence performance in health care, 3 , 4 and to enhance the positive impact of evidence‐based strategies adapted from outside the organization. 5 While some advances in health care can be applied generically across settings, researchers have documented the importance of innovation and adaptation by local implementation teams, 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 and customization to patients and context is a key part of patient‐centered, high‐quality care. 10 These observations from health care cohere with management research from other industries, which posits that when innovation depends on complex contextual information that is difficult to codify and transfer, innovation‐related problem solving needs to occur where that information is held, 11 and by the individuals who have agency to act on these solutions. 12 That is, key innovations must be made by staff located at each implementation site.

Despite the known importance of creativity in problem solving, relatively few studies detail how workers incorporate creativity into problem solving during the natural course of work—in health care or in other industries. 13 Prior research on creative problem solving in the workplace has been largely theoretical, 14 , 15 with some empirical research deriving from industries such as new product development 16 , 17 where novelty is an explicit goal of work. Such research also focuses on creative outcomes while neglecting processes that incorporate creativity as habit and routine, that is, as part of the organizational culture. 18 , 19 , 20 , 21 Detailed studies of front‐line problem solving in the automotive industry provide a useful framework for considering the dimensions of problem solving—including an important distinction between problem definition and generation of solutions 22 —but do not focus on creativity and innovation. More research is needed to better understand how creativity manifests during complex problem solving in health care. 18

Prominent learning and quality improvement models in health care assume that both problem definition and generation of solutions can be important sites of creativity. Models including Lean/Six‐Sigma, 23 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Model for Improvement, 24 the strategic problem‐solving process, 25 and user‐centered design 26 focus on uncovering nonobvious problems through an emphasis on root cause analysis and understanding user experience. More research is needed to understand the process by which creativity manifests when grappling with the complexity and customization that health care demands. 20

Even as more health care organizations seek to become learning organizations by implementing structured improvement interventions, 23 reports of such efforts highlight the fact that these improvement interventions do not always achieve intended results. Health care teams must overcome distinctive and substantial barriers to creativity, including strong hierarchies, aversion to risk, highly specialized professionals, and emphasis on standardization of care to promote reliability and quality. 27 , 28 There can be tension between creativity and health care performance improvement, as health care delivery often seeks to minimize variation, and the core of creativity is enhancing variation. 29 Yet, influencing performance in health care often requires moving beyond stability and the status quo, a process well served by incorporating creativity. 27 Accumulating grounded evidence on how creative problem solving manifests in a variety of health care contexts is important for advancing understanding of this phenomenon. 30

2. QUESTION OF INTEREST

To describe in detail how creativity emerges as health care workers engage in problem solving, we sought to characterize the processes through which creativity emerged in problem solving within hospitals seeking to reduce mortality from acute myocardial infarction (AMI) as part of a 2‐year performance improvement collaborative called leadership saves lives (LSL). Mortality for AMI, now publicly reported and included in the value‐based purchasing bundle, 31 is influenced by components of care delivery that cross multiple boundaries within and outside of the hospital. 32 , 33 One important contributor to lower AMI mortality is clinicians' ability to resolve open‐ended problems through creative thinking. 34 Creative problem solving is especially relevant to AMI care teams working to reduce mortality because of the multifaceted nature of the problem, which spans multiple units and levels of hierarchy within the hospital, and extends past hospital boundaries to pre‐hospital and post discharge systems. Each care setting is unique in numerous important ways, making it essential for teams to develop novel solutions that work in their own contexts (ie, apply creativity).

The LSL collaborative involved 10 hospitals in which AMI care teams engaged in a curriculum designed to foster group learning and problem solving. While teams were encouraged to be creative in their problem solving, the limitations of prior evidence meant that the intervention could not be prescriptive about exactly how creativity was expected to be cultivated. As described elsewhere, 35 participating hospital teams reported increased capacity for learning and problem solving, and their hospitals experienced significant decreases in risk‐stratified mortality rate (RSMR) over the course of the study period, suggesting that these hospitals would be an ideal context for examining multiple instances of creative problem solving and distilling common patterns. We anticipate that findings will be useful to researchers and practitioners who wish to understand how creativity can be fostered in problem solving to improve clinical outcomes.

3.1. Study design and setting

We conducted a qualitative study to understand how creativity was fostered during problem solving in the 10 hospitals that took part in the LSL collaborative from 2014 to 2016. As previously described, 35 hospitals were selected for participation from the membership of the Mayo Clinic Care Network (MCCN), a national group of medical systems committed to quality improvement through collaboration. From the 21 MCCN members (as of January 2014), hospitals were identified as candidates if they met all three eligibility criteria: (a) at least 200 AMI discharges per year to ensure sufficient experience in caring for patients with AMI, (b) average or below average national performance on 30‐day RSMR between January 07, 2009 and June 30, 2012 as reported by Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Hospital Compare in Spring 2014, suggesting opportunity for improvement, and (c) the largest hospital in the system, for hospitals in multihospital systems. From the list of 18 hospitals that met eligibility criteria, random sampling with a purposeful component 36 as used to select hospitals that were diverse in geography and teaching status. The first 10 hospitals were approached to determine receptivity; two declined and were replaced with sites similar in geography and teaching status. Hospital characteristics are presented in Table  1 .

Hospital characteristics (n = 10 hospitals)

3.2. LSL intervention

The LSL intervention, previously described in detail, 37 was implemented from June 2014 to June 2016. LSL was designed to foster reductions in AMI mortality by supporting the implementation of evidence‐based strategies and fostering improvements in domains of organizational culture related to hospital performance. Each hospital established a guiding coalition of approximately 15 staff involved in care of patients with AMI, representing multiple departments, and including senior executives as well as front‐line staff. Guiding coalition members participated in four, 1‐day workshops in which they were coached through a strategic problem‐solving methodology 25 to define a shared problem (ie, RSMR is too high) and objective (ie, reduce RSMR), and then use root cause analysis to generate, implement, and evaluate strategies designed to achieve the defined objective. Erika Linnander led intervention workshops at multiple LSL hospitals, and Erika Linnander and Leslie Curry engaged with guiding coalitions in three annual workshops that convened representatives of all 10 hospitals participating in LSL. LSL coalitions were encouraged to develop strategies that fit their unique contexts, through both tailoring existing evidence‐based practices and introducing completely novel approaches. The evidence‐based practices include monthly meetings with emergency medical services personnel to review AMI cases, identification of both physician and nurse champions for AMI care, nurses dedicated to the catheterization lab (not cross‐staffing from other units), pharmacist rounding on all inpatients with AMI, and creative problem solving. As noted earlier, the intervention did not prescribe specific approaches to cultivate creativity. Guiding coalitions were also encouraged to foster improvements in hospital culture related to AMI performance, focusing on domains of: learning environment, 38 psychological safety, 39 senior management support, 40 commitment to the organization, 41 and time for improvement efforts. 39

3.3. Data collection

We collected qualitative data about the use of creativity in problem solving in LSL hospitals using in‐depth, in‐person interviews 36 at the start of the LSL intervention, and at 6 months and 18 months into the 2‐year intervention. A team of interviewers who included individuals with backgrounds in qualitative research, health care management, and clinical care conducted interviews with staff involved in the guiding coalition as well as other clinicians and hospital executives, using a standardized interview guide ( Data S1 ). The interview guide asked about implementation of creative problem‐solving strategies as part of a broader set of interview questions examining the hospital's experience with LSL. Amanda Brewster and Leslie Curry were members of the team that conducted interviews. Interview participants were aware of the LSL intervention and aware that research was being conducted to understand the process of implementing the LSL intervention as well as its impact. Interviews took place at the hospitals where participants worked, generally in a quiet room. A total of 197 individuals participated in one or more interviews, with 162 interviews at baseline, 118 at 6 months, and 113 at 18 months into the intervention, for a total of 393 interviews (Table  2 ). The number of individual interviewees per hospital ranged from 15 to 26. Interviews lasted approximately 45 minutes and were audiotaped and professionally transcribed. The research procedures were reviewed and determined to be exempt by the Yale University Institutional Research Board.

Interview participant characteristics

3.4. Data analysis

Interview transcripts were analyzed by a 6‐member multidisciplinary team using the constant comparative method of analysis. 42 The current analysis of creative problem solving focused on content in which participants discussed work processes that they self‐identified as creative or promoting creativity, that is, ideas that were both novel and useful. Participants did not have to use the terms “creative” or “creativity” explicitly. Content could be coded as referring to creative problem solving if participants were providing examples in response to the structured interview questions on creative problem solving strategies, or if participants discussed processes for generating novel and useful ideas in response to other interview questions. We considered that participants would be best positioned to assess whether something was creative in the context of their environments, and therefore relied on participants' own judgements regarding novel and useful elements of the phenomenon. Each transcript was coded independently by at least three analysts, with discrepancies reconciled through negotiated consensus. A hybrid coding approach 43 in which we began with a small number of a priori codes based on key LSL program elements and added new codes as additional themes emerged during coding. Iterative coding and analysis occurred across each wave of data collection, with refinement and review by the full team of six analysts, until a final code structure was established and reapplied to the full dataset. We used Atlas.ti to facilitate coding and organization of data. The analysis team included members with diverse perspectives, representing expertise in health services research, management, organizational theory, social work, nursing, medicine, and anthropology. We sought to generate recurrent themes that characterize essential aspects of creative problem solving in hospital contexts, examining instances in which creativity emerged in uncovering nonobvious problems or finding novel solutions.

Across hospitals, participant descriptions of creativity in problem solving generally entailed the use of three prominent behaviors: (a) collecting new and diverse information, (b) accepting (rather than dismissing) disruptive information, and (c) employing empathy (ie, to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position). Each of the three behaviors appeared at times sufficient to advance creative problem solving by fostering a broad, inclusive new view of AMI care, which we term an “ecological view” (Figure  1 ). The following sections detail the three behaviors, followed by the emergent concept of an ecological view of AMI care.

Concepts identified as important to creative problem solving. Working from the right‐hand side of the figure, creativity in problem solving was promoted by the assembly of a new, ecological view of AMI care. At least one of three behaviors was typically used by LSL coalitions to foster this ecological view

4.1. Collecting new and diverse information

Collecting new and diverse information was a behavior that routinely contributed to creativity in problem solving for LSL coalitions. Sometimes the new information came from assembling new data or analyzing data in new ways; for example, conducting new analyses of mortality data helped LSL coalitions at several hospitals to expand their conception of their AMI mortality challenges to include non‐STEMI patients (patients with non‐ST segment elevation myocardial infarction). This was a significant shift, as most prior quality improvement efforts had focused exclusively on STEMI patients. As an example, a cardiologist on one hospital's team undertook a close and systematic review of AMI deaths, as part of a root cause analysis recommended in the LSL intervention, and noticed that non‐STEMI care seemed to offer greater opportunities for improvement, explaining:

With STEMI's there was never any waiting… but in non‐STEMIs [there were] delays… STEMI's, they all die after you've revascularized them. You've done everything you could… But the non‐STEMI's are coming in. Somebody thought they were stable, and then they deteriorate which makes you think you've got really more of an opportunity with them. (Hospital J, Physician).

In other cases, new and diverse information came from the LSL coalitions engaging personnel who had not previously been involved in problem solving related to AMI mortality. For example, an emergency medicine physician in one hospital described how input from personnel outside the LSL coalition informed plans for introducing a dedicated cardiology physician assistant (PA) role that would remain on site at all times. After the hospital's LSL coalition coalesced around the idea to add this role, the coalition sought out opinions from different stakeholders elsewhere in the organization, who brought to light a wide range of issues that would need to be worked out in order to successfully implement this solution. A physician on the LSL coalition described:

Then [a senior administrator] presented the other stuff, that I never thought of. Who technically has ownership of that PA?… How does the funding for that position come from everyone, if the revenue goes through one of our different cardiology groups?… I never thought of that. I said, “Give me a body, and have them there 24/7.”…Then the cardiologists say, “Well, it's great. What we do with the PAs when they're not in the cath lab?… That creative problem solving comes from listening to everyone's different opinions, and having the ability to separate me from the project. Taking out my own biases. (Hospital B, Emergency Medicine Physician).

Synthesizing diverse views allowed the team to gain a more accurate understanding of implementation challenges, enhancing the practical utility and likely impact of their ideas.

4.2. Accepting (rather than dismissing) disruptive information

Leveraging new and diverse information sources for creative problem solving typically required a second, distinct behavior: accepting (rather than dismissing) disruptive or unwelcome information. In describing instances where new information contributed to the development of novel and useful solutions, participants routinely described processes to overcome resistance to new information. For example, after the LSL coalition at Hospital J shifted to thinking about non‐STEMI care as a potential problem to address, team members identified another problem: high‐risk non‐STEMIs were difficult to identify. After getting input from other physicians and nurses and reviewing non‐STEMI risk guidelines from the American College of Cardiology, the LSL coalition recommended two major changes to improve care for patients with non‐STEMI AMI: a new protocol to equip nurses to initiate care for inpatients with evolving AMIs, and a new set of algorithms and procedures for attending cardiologists to more consistently review at‐risk cases. These new procedures met with initial resistance from other cardiologists within the hospital, but the opponents “knew that they couldn't just blow it off completely,” according to an LSL coalition member, because the LSL coalition had carefully documented a previously unrecognized pattern of non‐STEMI deaths pointing to the need for change. The LSL coalition helped to engineer this acceptance of information that diverged from prior beliefs by employing data, methodology, and a respected cardiologist as the messenger that would be compelling to the cardiologists.

In other situations, accepting disruptive information involved elevating the weight given to input from frontline personnel lower in the organizational hierarchy. The LSL guiding coalitions included perspectives not traditionally included in hospital process improvement discussions, such as EMS representatives external to the hospital. The perception that these representatives occupied positions that were more peripheral to the hospital and lower in the organizational hierarchy could have set up their perspectives to be dismissed. This risk was exemplified by the concerns of a paramedic on one LSL coalition, who reported initially feeling skeptical about the value he could add to a group that included high status individuals such as cardiovascular surgeons and department heads, who were seen as intimidating. (“I'm like, what's pre‐hospital's role? I mean this is a big, huge hospital system.”) Over time though, this paramedic saw that his perspective was actively accepted, and he was empowered to share his opinions with the group. Intentional emphasis on the importance of EMS by the LSL intervention facilitator aided this effort:

One of the first things [the team facilitator] brought up was the statistics on pre‐hospital, how much they're involved… Then I have [a physician] sitting right next to me, who looks at me and says, “What do you think about it? What can we do to improve the pre‐hospital side of things?” To me that brought me right into the team. (Hospital A, Paramedic).

Although hospital leaders were generally aware of the need to improve pre‐hospital processes, listening to and valuing the input from the EMS representative was key for the LSL coalition at Hospital A to understand the specific problems occurring at the interface of pre‐hospital and hospital care, a situation seen at other LSL hospitals as well. Once the problems had been identified, solutions could be introduced. In the case of Hospital A, the solution was for the hospital to hire an EMS liaison with experience as a paramedic to manage communication between pre‐hospital, emergency department, and other staff from the hospital who need to be activated to care for AMI patients. This solution was so widely recognized as effective in facilitating coordination across these systems that the hospital leadership agreed to fund a second liaison position.

Experience at another hospital illustrated how the hospital's senior management played an important role in getting team members to take new information seriously and thereby spurred creativity in problem solving. As part of the LSL project, this hospital started documenting the wait times for EKG results. These new data showed that slow EKG results routinely delayed AMI care. The EKG wait time measure represented new and disruptive information for the hospital, because EKG wait time had not previously been tracked or understood to delay AMI care. Senior managers within the hospital held firm on the need to substantially reduce EKG wait times, even after multiple barriers to solving this problem were identified: from limitations on which staff could perform EKGs, to transmission of results being slowed by wireless connectivity drops in different parts of the floor, to EKG results being printed in an area where they weren't immediately noticed. The stance of leaders, who were encouraging but very firm about the need to improve on the EKG wait time measure, forced ED teams to develop creative solutions rather than accept the inevitability of delays. The introduction of new, disruptive information about EKG wait times, coupled with active endorsement by multiple managers, represented a departure from previous quality improvement efforts in which teams were seen to resign themselves to the status quo. One manger explained:

[In earlier improvement efforts] I would hear an answer from one team that says, “No. This can't be done.” [Now] I think we have leaders who… are very good at saying, “Why not?” Then when we start looking at “why not,” we often find that, oh yeah, maybe it's possible… If [the leader] says I'm satisfied with, “This can't be done,” then you're not going to have much creative thinking. (Hospital I, Manager).

Taking the data on EKG wait times as a serious indicator of problems led to a variety of creative solutions being implemented in the ED over the course of the LSL project, including training new categories of staff members to perform EKGs, putting existing communication technologies to new uses, establishing a new space where EKGs could be performed when the ED was full, and printing EKGs in a new location, near the physicians who needed to interpret them. The changes were effective: the proportion of at‐risk patients receiving EKGs within the target time of 10 minutes rose from under 30% to 80%.

4.3. Employing empathy

Employing empathy—having problem‐solving staff consciously shift their mindsets to empathize with the experiences of colleagues or patients—was the third behavior regularly observed to foster creative problem solving for LSL coalitions. An example of empathizing with colleagues at referring facilities was reported by participants from Hospital F, which served as a referral center for AMI patients across a large region. As part of the LSL initiative, a nurse from the LSL coalition visited facilities that frequently transferred AMI patients to the hospital and followed the transfer process alongside providers at one referring facilities, which allowed her to experience the frustration of transfers from the referring facility's perspective (ie, empathize). She described the experience as follows:

I got myself involved in [a patient transfer] with their emergency physician, trying to help coordinate the transfer of that patient [from the outlying facility to our hospital]. It was amazing how complicated our system had made it to get a patient transferred. I was able to be that advocate and see it from that view and then experience that frustration from that provider standpoint. (Hospital F, Nurse).

Seeing transfers from the perspective of referring facilities revealed several flaws in the process, which were delaying patient care and led to the development of new approaches to streamline communication with referring facilities.

Another example of empathizing with colleagues was seen at Hospital D, where the director of cardiac services discussed the importance of understanding, in detail, the perspective of EKG technicians in order to address problems with EKG processes. He encouraged his team to go observe the EKG techs at work, to understand “steps to their job” and consider how to help them:

The first part is, don't be afraid to call and say, “I have a problem.” The second part is…go back, and [ask] what does the EKG tech do? They didn't know….[I said] maybe you ought to go with them for a while. You gotta go figure out…what are the steps to their job, and how can we make it more efficient, help them in quality? We learned together. We problem solve together. (Hospital D, Physician).

An example of empathizing with patients motivating creative problem solving was reported by a nurse coordinator explaining what happened when the LSL coalition reviewed the hospital's discharge education materials for patients with AMI. It was clear that the materials were inadequate to help patients effectively discharge (“It was horrid. I can't even believe that's what we were giving patients”). The team knew that improved materials were needed, but felt overwhelmed by the range of options. Ultimately, they took an approach of trying to put themselves in the patient's shoes, which led to the development of a patient education resource that was regarded as the best patient education tool in the hospital:

We just had to sit down and really problem solve and be the patient in the matter. What is going to make a difference? What's going to grab my attention as a patient to better adhere to my discharge instructions and understand them? All the praise goes to [three team members] because they put together the best patient education tools that we have in the hospital. (Hospital F, Nurse).

4.4. Ecological view

While we observed three distinctive behaviors fostering creative problem solving, as described in the sections above, the behaviors tended to accomplish the same thing: the assembly of a broad, inclusive new view of AMI care, which we term an “ecological view.” This ecological view, fostered by teams collecting new and diverse information, accepting (rather than dismissing) disruptive information, and employing empathy, routinely contributed to LSL coalitions creatively uncovering nonobvious problems and finding novel solutions. Figure  1 outlines our concept of how creativity in problem solving was driven by development of an ecological view of the care process.

We adopt the biological metaphor of ecology, which is often used in the study of organizations (Freeman 2006), 44 to connote the development of a shared understanding of AMI care that reflected the relationships among a wide range of different individual care providers, organizational sub‐units, and their environment. Organization scholars commonly analyze populations of organizations in an ecological context. We use the term “ecological view” to describe the emergence of self‐awareness inside the organization of this ecological context, as some of these providers and relationships were previously unknown, or known to only some but not all team members. The ecological view, in turn, infused the problem‐solving process with creativity—allowing team members to see the contours of problems that not previously been identified and to develop novel solutions.

5. DISCUSSION

In instances where creativity emerged during the problem‐solving process within LSL hospitals, a characteristic process was observed in which team members generated an ecological view of the AMI care process, reflecting a more complete understanding of relationships between care providers, organizational sub‐units, and their environment. The ecological view of AMI care sparked teams to define previously unrecognized problems, and to develop novel, tailored solutions. The experiences of the LSL hospitals indicated that identifying nonobvious problems represented an important site of creativity in the problem‐solving process. While our results stem from an initiative to improve AMI mortality, they could apply to initiatives to improve outcomes for other complex conditions involving care that spans disciplines, departments, and organizations, such as stroke, heart failure, and diabetes.

The emergence of the ecological view that supported creativity in problem solving was regularly fostered by at least three different behaviors: collecting new information, accepting disruptive information, and employing empathy. Although the role of the ecological view in creative problem solving was not theorized during the development or delivery of the LSL intervention, several of the LSL intervention components explicitly encouraged behaviors that we observed to promote an ecological view, and could be helpful for other hospitals seeking to promote creativity in problem solving. Specifically, the LSL intervention team facilitated the development of guiding coalitions with diverse membership, advised hospital teams to conduct root cause analyses, which fed the collection of new information, and coached on group processes to promote psychological safety to foster the process of surfacing disruptive information from individuals whose perspectives might not be known. Efforts to encourage empathy were not an intentional component of the LSL intervention although raising awareness of psychological safety could have heightened participants' focus on the feelings of others. Empathy—the exercise of intentionally placing oneself in a new perspective—emerged as an especially powerful tactic to leverage exposure to new information. This is consistent with prior research on problem solving in manufacturing, which identifies advantages of observing, first‐hand, a mechanical part in the situation where it is malfunctioning, as a way of getting richer information. 22 In the context of our study, the immersive quality of exercises in empathy may have provided richer information, and also emotional cues, which enhanced LSL coalition members' motivation to act on novel ideas that would have dissipated in the face of less compelling experiences. Intrinsic motivation has been theorized as an important contributor to individual creativity. 1

The behaviors we identified promoting an ecological view are not new to the quality improvement literature—other commonly used quality improvement models such as Lean and Six Sigma emphasize collection of new data and inclusion of diverse perspectives in understanding variability, waste, and poor performance. 45 , 46 Empathy for end‐users features as a component of the design‐thinking process, which is being used by some health care organizations for quality improvement. 26 Our results, however, provide real‐world examples of how these concepts foster creative problem solving in the context of a quality improvement intervention that targeted an outcome measure influenced by complex processes. While we reported the three behaviors that featured most prominently in participants' descriptions of examples where an ecological view emerged to promote creativity in problem solving during the LSL intervention, it is possible that other behaviors and supporting structures may promote the emergence of an ecological view in different settings. Notably, in the hospitals we studied, these three behaviors depended on support from a critical mass of team members in diverse clinical and managerial roles as well as hospital senior leadership. It is hard to say whether individual clinicians or staff members could enhance their own creative problem‐solving capabilities by applying these behaviors in isolation.

Our results should be interpreted in light of several study limitations. First, with 10 hospitals, our sample was relatively small, although hospitals were selected to be diverse in terms of geography, size, and teaching status, and each hospital tackled several dimensions of AMI care, thus accumulating a larger number of examples of problem solving. Further, the robust, longitudinal qualitative design allowed for deep characterization of the improvement process in each hospital. Second, hospitals in the study were exposed to a leadership development curriculum that encouraged a structured approach to problem solving; the process of creativity in problem solving may proceed differently in hospitals that had not been supported in this way. Third, we were not able to collect data on whether particular interventions introduced by the LSL hospitals were effective, or sustained over time beyond the study period, which prevents us from concluding whether solution quality was improved by creative problem solving in this study. We do know that LSL hospitals reduced AMI RSMR more quickly than the national average over the same time period, 35 suggesting that LSL hospitals did make changes that improved RSMR during the study period.

Our results provide a refined depiction of the creative problem‐solving process based on empirical observations across multiple hospitals. These findings suggest that health systems seeking to promote creative problem solving could encourage the three behaviors we have documented to advance an ecological view of care processes. As exploratory research, these findings point toward several opportunities for further study. First, it would be useful to examine the creative problem‐solving process in a different set of hospitals, working to improve a different outcome, to confirm the generalizability of our findings. A next step could include quantitatively testing the hypothesis that forming an ecological view is indeed constitutive of the creative problem‐solving process, and improves solution quality. Doing this could involve developing a survey‐based measure of the extent to which quality improvement teams have developed an ecological view of their target process, and evaluating the creativity and effectiveness of their solutions.

6. CONCLUSIONS

Creativity is crucial to performance improvement in health care, and evidence from other industries has linked individual traits such as motivation and values, as well as organizational traits such as leadership style, team climate, and decentralized structure to creative performance. 14 , 18 , 47 Seeking to illuminate the process by which creative problem solving occurs in health care, we observed a characteristic process that occurred across different hospitals, in which distinctive patterns of acquiring and processing new information contributed to creativity. These distinctive behaviors can be fostered by health care leaders seeking to improve performance on consequential clinical outcomes, including AMI mortality.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Supporting information

Data S1. Qualitative interview guide

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Funding for the Leadership Saves Lives (LSL) collaborative and its evaluation was provided through a research grant to Yale University from The Medicines Company, Parsippany, New Jersey. The authors thank the hospitals and guiding coalition members that participated in LSL for their time and dedication.

Brewster AL, Lee YSH, Linnander EL, Curry LA. Creativity in problem solving to improve complex health outcomes: Insights from hospitals seeking to improve cardiovascular care . Learn Health Sys . 2022; 6 ( 2 ):e10283. 10.1002/lrh2.10283 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

Funding information Medicines Company

Problem Solving

Read our most recent articles about problem solving. how do you approach your organization's most difficult challenges.

5 Elements to Consider when Commercializing Your Ideas

Sarah Vandenberg 2022-07-06T16:12:47-07:00 July 6th, 2022 |

In this article, we look at five tips to launch your next innovation, using a proven framework for successful launch and scale.

What Is Idea Management?

Sarah Vandenberg 2022-06-23T15:51:03-07:00 June 27th, 2022 |

Traditional innovation can only take your business so far, and without an evolution of processes, you might find it harder than ever to move new ideas forward. Introducing structures and systems to formulate, organize, and act upon new ideas is one of the best ways to optimize internal innovation. This practice is better known as idea management, and in this article we will define and discuss idea management in full.

What is the Process for an Employee Innovation Challenge?

Sarah Vandenberg 2022-01-04T15:07:32-08:00 January 19th, 2022 |

A growing trend over the past several years has been to host internal innovation challenges. Companies do this because they find it’s an excellent way to find solutions to long-standing problems, positively create culture (particularly in a remote workplace), and also to nurture the budding intrapreneurs who want to find career growth and new opportunities.

Calculating the ROI of an Idea: Ideas That Saved Time

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-10-06T09:37:16-07:00 September 29th, 2021 |

Crowdsourcing and open innovation initiatives are vital by bringing vast stakeholders together to share ideas on complex problems and opportunities. Much of the focus is set on engaging the crowd yet deciding which ideas to take a risk on requires data on the likely impacts and costs. 

How Do You Uncover Unseen Problems?

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T14:35:39-08:00 August 18th, 2021 |

Anyone who works in the problem definition space knows the pitfalls of hidden issues. Solving a problem is sometimes dependent on who is articulating the problem, the lens with which they view the world, and the space that they have at the table...

Create a Team of Master Problem Solvers

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-07-27T20:26:57-07:00 July 29th, 2021 |

Problem-solving is an essential skill as an innovator. If problems stump your employees, how can your organization ever innovate for customers? Luckily, problem-solving skills can be learned, and as a leader you can create a team of master problem solvers and innovators.

In Search of the Perfect Brainstorm: An Update of Collaborative Ideation

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T14:32:13-08:00 July 26th, 2021 |

Imaginary scenario: you have been invited to a meeting to explore new approaches to a wicked problem. Loudmouth Number 1 describes his solution. Loudmouth Number 2 vehemently disagrees. A heated argument ensues. Some people take sides. Others remain silent. There are bruised egos. You are not the only one who feels frustrated. All that time just one single idea has been considered. Have you ever experienced such a meeting? Have you ever wondered why brainstorming came to be? Brainstorming Today: Why It Needs an Update These days the noun “brainstorming” and the verb “to brainstorm” are used (and misused) extensively and in many different ways. Our working definition in this article is that brainstorming is a “process to enable purposeful, [...]

Leveraging Alien Thinking: Exclusive Interview with Cyril Bouquet, Jean-Louis Barsoux, and Michael Wade

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-06-08T10:19:28-07:00 June 8th, 2021 |

For the past decade,  Cyril Bouquet ,  Jean-Louis Barsoux , and  Michael Wade , professors of innovation and strategy at IMD Business School, have studied inventors, scientists, doctors, entrepreneurs, and artists. These people, or “aliens,” as the authors call them, are able to make leaps of creativity, and use five patterns of thinking that distinguish them from the rest of us.

What Can We Learn from the Innovation Averages in 2020?

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-03-24T19:37:01-07:00 January 11th, 2021 |

Every year, IdeaScale conducts an in-depth study of their customer trends in order to write an annual report, provide benchmarks to our clients (and ourselves), and better understand the marketplace. This data gathering and analysis takes up the better part of our first quarter and our report is generally published in March, but 2020 is a unique year for the crowdsourced innovation community (and indeed for everyone in the world).

Why Your Employees Are the Key to Recovery

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-03-24T19:37:05-07:00 November 26th, 2020 |

In this article, we will look at how to identify and understand employee contributions, and learn how to work with idea generators, evaluators, and activators.

Agile Development for Manufacturers: The Emergent Gating Model

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-11-16T13:16:11-08:00 November 10th, 2020 |

Agile is employed within Stage-Gate for new-product development by manufacturers with positive performance results; but must be adjusted from the software version of Agile – the result: the emergent Agile-Stage-Gate hybrid model.

How to Digitally Spark Corporate Innovation

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-22T17:13:47-08:00 July 9th, 2020 |

To maintain relevance in the global competitive market, many companies already focus on the development and implementation of innovations, even using digital tools. But, in times of crisis, this focus is most likely to be lost when most businesses concentrate on keeping the daily business running.

Human Creativity: The Critical Survival Skill of the 4th Industrial Revolution that Cannot be Automated

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T12:02:51-08:00 July 3rd, 2020 |

While 4th Industrial Revolution technologies are fast becoming the way to go in the world of the "new normal," they are driven by something far superior to robots: human creativity. Let's have a look at the importance of creativity in this article.

How Mind Mapping Boosts Your Creativity

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T11:55:09-08:00 May 22nd, 2020 |

Everyone has the power to be creative, but how can you bring your innovative thoughts to life? Discover how Mind Mapping can unlock your creative potential in this article.

Five Innovation Practices for Building & Managing an Innovation Program

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T11:41:02-08:00 April 1st, 2020 |

There is no “one size fits all” formula for innovation management success. Demystifying innovation takes experiments and practices. In this article, we'll explore five tactics to use in order to develop and manage a successful innovation program.

Innovators, How Do You Find Your Next Problem to Solve?

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T11:38:16-08:00 March 23rd, 2020 |

If you’re working in innovation there’s nothing as rewarding as making the long journey from inspiration to implementation.

Four Innovation Themes from Open Nation 2019

Ideascale 2021-12-20T11:13:49-08:00 December 4th, 2019 |

Every year, IdeaScale hosts innovation leaders and creative thinkers from around the world in a global summit that shares innovation best practices. These leaders share success stories, failures, challenges, and solutions as they get to know each other so that they can call on one another throughout the year (long after the event is over).

What’s the Best Idea Criteria for Innovation Programs?

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T11:11:59-08:00 November 27th, 2019 |

One of the most popular webinars that IdeaScale has ever hosted is our webinar on how to select the best ideas . We are constantly being asked by our customers and prospects, “how do I know a good idea when I see one?” Some people are looking for financial predictions, some people want to know how an idea measures up to their organizational objectives, but everyone is looking for the perfect set of criteria so that they can evaluate ideas at some point during the innovation process and validate them.

The 3 C’s: Complex Problem Solving, Creativity and Critical Thinking – Core Soft Skills Required in the Workplace of the 4th Industrial Revolution

Ideascale 2021-12-20T10:31:26-08:00 November 8th, 2019 |

The next in our series on the 4th Industrial Revolution, from the Business Optimization Training Institute (BOTI). Start with Part I here .

Innovation Via the Customer Journey

Ideascale 2021-12-20T10:52:06-08:00 October 25th, 2019 |

Innovation is usually spoken of in relation to products, research, and development. However, every aspect of your business can be innovated. In fact, one of the most important – and often overlooked – is customer service. Innovative customer service helps you build loyalty, encourages repeat business, and can also bring in new buyers as they observe how you care for your consumers.

Psychology Tips to Get Honest Feedback from Your Employees

Ideascale 2021-12-20T10:49:13-08:00 October 18th, 2019 |

Learn four essential tips that employers and HR departments should consider when trying to get honest input from their employees.

How Many Types of Innovation Are There?

Sarah Vandenberg 2021-12-20T10:38:10-08:00 September 23rd, 2019 |

Innovation thought leader Nick Skillicorn recently did a pretty good job summarizing all of the innovation theories. And we noticed that there are a few key similarities between most (or all) of these theories that we think are interesting! Download this infographic to learn more about the 15 Theories of Innovation.

Five Business Shifts That Will Put Learning at The Heart of The Agenda

Ideascale 2021-12-20T08:29:15-08:00 May 31st, 2019 |

In our recent book The Future Reinvented , we are argued that, in the face of seemingly unprecedented change across society, learning at every level is central to survival and growth.

Recent Innovations in Healthcare

Ideascale 2021-12-20T08:22:05-08:00 May 17th, 2019 |

From patient care technology and equipment to public health research and new alternative treatments for sufferers of chronic pain, the healthcare field has always relied on innovation.

Five Perspectives of Innovators

Ideascale 2021-12-17T12:44:55-08:00 January 29th, 2019 |

Innovators are among us and within us, spot them by how they think and do things differently.

How To Effectively Deal With Unhappy Clients

Ideascale 2021-12-17T12:42:26-08:00 January 21st, 2019 |

No matter what the nature of your business is, you will inevitably encounter unhappy clients. Whether this is because it’s the fault of the company or something that couldn’t have been prevented – your first priority needs to be solving the problem.

A More Innovative Europe? Think Different About Innovation!

Ideascale 2021-12-17T12:17:47-08:00 December 20th, 2018 |

In Brussels, the Research & Innovation Program Horizon Europe (FP9) is the talk of ‘EU town’. Horizon Europe is hoped to be the great leap forward of Europe to close the innovation gap to the US and stay ahead of the emerging innovation giant China in the coming years.

Why Aptitude Tests Are Important for Jobs in Innovation

Ideascale 2021-12-15T07:28:52-08:00 September 25th, 2018 |

Innovation is one of the main ways in which a business can differentiate itself from the competition. Innovation could take place by improving business processes or by entering new markets after upgrading current product and service offerings. To be innovative, companies need creative employees who have the ability to transform ideas into reality.

Privacy Overview

14 innovative projects helping to save the planet and make the world a better place

UpLink helps communities across the world face the threats of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic. Image:  Unsplash/Noah Buscher

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Natalie Marchant

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} COVID-19 is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:.

• Digital crowdsourcing platform UpLink was created to address the world’s most pressing problems.
• The initiative seeks sustainable solutions to tackle issues such as climate change and social injustice.
• Projects are also aimed at tackling the impact of the global coronavirus pandemic.

The importance of sustainable solutions came to the fore in 2020 as communities across the world faced the threats of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic.

Digital crowdsourcing platform UpLink was created to address such challenges and help speed up the delivery of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals.

Unveiled at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in 2020, the platform - launched with founding partners Deloitte and Salesforce - connects the next generation of change-makers and social entrepreneurs to networks of contacts with the resources, expertise and experience to help bring about change.

Since its launch, UpLink has surfaced the best entrepreneurial solutions through competitions such as its Ocean Solutions Sprint , Trillion Trees Challenge , COVID-19 Social Justice Challenge and COVID Challenges . Here are some of the most innovative.

Have you read?

3 innovations leading the fight to save our forests, these 15 innovations are helping us fight covid-19 and its aftermath, 4 ideas that could make our response to covid-19 more equal.

Ocean Solutions Sprint

Cubex Global

Oman-based Cubex Global aims to cut global shipping emissions by enabling businesses to easily buy and sell unused container space on existing cargo routes. The company claims that its blockchain-based marketplace could help reduce emissions from shipping vessels by up to 20% and recover about $25 billion in lost freight revenue each year.

Waste management service RecyGlo works with businesses in Myanmar and Malaysia to recycle and process material in a safe and non-hazardous manner, helping to avoid mismanaged plastic being dumped in the region’s rivers and ending up in the ocean. The Yangon-based company manages 500 tonnes of waste and saves 1,470 tonnes of CO2 each month .

Scottish biotech start-up Oceanium uses sustainably-farmed seaweed to create food and nutrition products and compostable biopackaging. It believes that a sustainable seaweed farming industry can help mitigate the effects of climate change and create jobs.

COVID Challenge

Intelehealth

Developed at Johns Hopkins University, Intelehealth is a telemedicine platform that connects patients and frontline health workers with remote doctors to deliver primary care services at a distance in countries such as India.

UpLink is a digital platform to crowdsource innovations in an effort to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

It is an open platform designed to engage anyone who wants to offer a contribution for the global public good. The core objective is to link up the best innovators to networks of decision-makers, who can implement the change needed for the next decade. As a global platform, UpLink serves to aggregate and guide ideas and impactful activities, and make connections to scale-up impact.

Hosted by the World Economic Forum, UpLink is being designed and developed in collaboration with Salesforce, Deloitte and LinkedIn.

Emergency services app Flare provides next-generation 911 for those who do not have access to help in case of an emergency. In Kenya, its ‘Uber for ambulances’ platform has reduced response times by 87% and helped save 2,500 lives since its 2017 launch.

Carbon Health

Tech-enabled primary care provider Carbon Health aims to improve access to world-class healthcare. In the US, it established pop-up COVID clinics in 30 cities, with doctors available on video call, and has so far tested more than 500,000 people .

Desolenator

Desolenator’s solar-powered water purification systems help remote communities produce clean drinking water, without the need for filters, chemicals or external energy sources. This helps them build water resilience in the face of climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic .

Trillion Trees Challenge

Borneo Nature Foundation

For over a decade, Borneo Nature Foundation has developed planting methods to reforest degraded deep peatland, which is an important carbon store, key to local economies and home to populations of orangutans. It has planted more than 30,000 seedlings , and established community seedling nurseries in villages near Borneo’s remaining tropical rainforests.

Reforestum and Ecosphere+

Spain-based CO2 offsetting service Reforestum teamed up with UK climate solutions company Ecosphere+ to enable individuals and businesses to finance forest conservation and restoration by offsetting their carbon footprint.

Inga Foundation

Slash-and-burn farming is the only source of income for millions of farmers but it’s devastating the world’s rainforests. This is something that the UK-based Inga Foundation wants to counter through its Inga Alley farming method, which helps farmers build long-term food security on one plot of land.

Social Justice Challenge

Global platform citiesRise seeks to transform mental health policy and practice for young people across the world through its Mental Health and Friendly Cities framework – something that is only likely to become even more relevant in the COVID-19 era.

Philippines-based telerehabilitation platform TheraWee aims to improve access to rehabilitation services for children with difficulties by connecting their parents with individuals, groups and communities that can offer them support.

Noora Health

US start-up Noora Health provides families with medical skills training to help look after their loved ones, both in health facilities and at home. Its Care Companion Program has already reached more than 1 million relatives in India and Bangladesh .

Family Mask’s #PPEforAll

Global Citizen Capital and its company Family Mask’s #PPEforAll initiative was set up to boost access to affordable personal protective equipment (PPE) as the pandemic hit. By July 2020, more than 1 million masks had been distributed to elderly people across the world.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Related topics:

The agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} weekly.

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on COVID-19 .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

Winding down COVAX – lessons learnt from delivering 2 billion COVID-19 vaccinations to lower-income countries

Charlotte Edmond

January 8, 2024

Here’s what to know about the new COVID-19 Pirola variant

October 11, 2023

How the cost of living crisis affects young people around the world

Douglas Broom

August 8, 2023

From smallpox to COVID: the medical inventions that have seen off infectious diseases over the past century

Andrea Willige

May 11, 2023

COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency. Here's what it means

Simon Nicholas Williams

May 9, 2023

New research shows the significant health harms of the pandemic 

Philip Clarke, Jack Pollard and Mara Violato

April 17, 2023

Enroll for Summer and Fall 2024! View the schedule of classes

• Faculty & Staff
• Accreditation
• Administrative Services
• Barstow College Foundation
• Board of Trustees
• History of the College
• Human Resources
• Maps & Directions
• Mission | Vision | Values
• Institutional Effectiveness
• Office of the President
• Performing Arts Center
• Fort Irwin Campus
• Admissions & Records
• Financial Aid
• Getting Started
• Welcome Resource Center
• Academic Calendar
• Academic Senate
• Adult Education
• Associate Degree Programs
• Associate Degrees for Transfer
• Barstow Reads
• Career & Technical Education (CTE)
• Certificate Programs
• Distance Education
• Guided Pathways
• OER & ZTC Pathways
• Office of the Vice President of Academic Affairs
• Programs of study
• Register for Classes
• Schedule of Classes
• Teaching and Learning Support Center (TLSC)
• Food Pantry & Basic Needs
• Barstow College Promise 2.0
• Counseling Services
• Office of the Vice President of Student Services
• Special Programs & Services
• Student Life
• Student Success and Equity
• The Mindful Space
• Transfer Center

Barstow Community College Recognizes Student Innovation and Problem-Solving in Solve Community Challenges Competition

Barstow, CA – April 5, 2024 – Barstow Community College (BCC) celebrates the ingenuity of its students in the Solve Community Challenges competition, where they tackled pressing local issues with inventive solutions. This week, BCC recognized the winners, who addressed homelessness, childcare, and affordable housing, with cash prizes and accolades from a panel of local business and community leaders.

The competition highlighted the power of collaborative problem-solving and leadership in effecting meaningful change. The solutions proposed by these teams demonstrated creativity, empathy, and a deep understanding of the challenges facing our communities.

Students, supported by faculty and staff from Barstow Community College (BCC), formed teams and collaborated through SolveCC, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering innovative thinking and entrepreneurial skills among community college students. Under the leadership of Barstow Community College Superintendent-President, Dr. Eva Bagg, and SolveCC Founder, Mojdeh Eskandari, students demonstrated their commitment to identifying and addressing pressing challenges in the communities served by the college.  “At BCC, we believe that the most powerful educational experiences channel students’ deep-seated interests with classroom learning and the opportunities and support to better understand the issues they care about and to go out and collectively generate innovative and actionable solutions for the betterment of themselves and others.”

Winning the top prize this year for the challenge to “identify a problem and propose a solution”, was Team Blue Horizon, led by Jason Dokie, a teacher from Barstow Unified School District and a BCC student. Comprised of 5th thru 7th graders, the team dedicated numerous hours to surveying and analyzing homeless concerns within their community. Dokie, with years of teaching experience and boundless belief in the capabilities of his students, expressed that Solve CC was a “great opportunity for students to get real world experience in applying their school knowledge and skills to improve and support their community.”

"We believe in the power of partnerships and collaboration to achieve meaningful change," added Harmony Griffin, Co-Lead of Team Downtown. "By working with local charities, businesses, and organizations, we can maximize our impact and create a sustainable model for addressing these critical issues."

Seeing first-hand the effect limited childcare resources has on BCC students, "Team Beauty & Brains” composed of BCC Teaching and Learning Support Center staff and students, focused on addressing the lack of childcare in the Barstow community. Team lead, Persephone Belle, noted that “Working at the TLSC, we see a lot of student parents struggling to balance being parents and going to college.”

Barstow Community College remains committed to nurturing the innovative spirit of its students and fostering positive change in the communities it serves. For more information about Barstow Community College and its initiatives, visit www.barstow.edu .

SolveCC invites students to be changemakers in their communities.  Learn more at http://www.solvecc.org/ .

Media Contact:

Amanda Simpson

Director, Public Relations, Communications, and Marketing

Barstow Community College

[email protected]

Copyright 2024 Barstow Community College. All Rights Reserved.

Tactical Menu

Codefi, center on rural innovation are gold sponsors for 2024 connecting entrepreneurial communities.

COLUMBIA, Mo. – Codefi and the Center on Rural Innovation are joint 2024 Gold Sponsors for University of Missouri Extension’s Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities (CEC), a conference dedicated to fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in rural areas.

The conference, Sept. 17-19 in Fulton, brings together leaders, innovators and change-makers to explore strategies for driving economic growth in rural communities, said Annette Kendall, chair of the MU Extension CEC state team.

“We are thrilled to partner with the MU Extension Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference,” said James Stapleton, president and CEO of Codefi. “At Codefi, we believe in the power of entrepreneurship to transform communities, and we are committed to delivering programs that foster innovation and create quality jobs and economic growth in areas often overlooked. We look forward to sharing our expertise and insights with conference attendees and collaborating with other stakeholders to help create capacity.”

Codefi provides high-growth venture and tech workforce development programs and services that eliminate the skills and opportunity gaps preventing workers and entrepreneurs in smaller metro areas, cities and rural communities across southern Missouri from thriving in the digital economy. Codefi was founded in Cape Girardeau in 2014 and has expanded to Springfield to serve the 47 southernmost counties in Missouri.

Partnering with Codefi as Gold Sponsor is the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI), a national nonprofit organization dedicated to advancing economic prosperity in rural America through entrepreneurship and technology-driven innovation.

“At CORI, we are passionate about creating opportunities for rural communities to thrive in the digital economy,” said Matt Dunne, CORI founder and executive director. “We are excited to partner with the MU Extension Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference to further our shared mission of empowering entrepreneurs and fostering innovation in rural areas. By working together, we can unlock the full potential of rural America and build a brighter future for all.”

Kendall expressed gratitude for the support of Codefi and CORI as a joint Gold Sponsor of the conference. “The partnership between Codefi, CORI and the Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference exemplifies our collective commitment to driving positive change in rural communities,” she said. “We are excited to collaborate with Codefi and CORI to create an engaging and impactful conference experience that empowers entrepreneurs and spurs economic growth in rural Missouri and beyond.”

Kendall said the 2024 Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference in Fulton promises to be a dynamic and informative event, featuring keynote presentations, breakout sessions and networking opportunities aimed at inspiring and equipping attendees to drive entrepreneurship and innovation in their communities.

The Callaway Chamber of Commerce, serving as the local host for the event, also expressed enthusiasm for the partnership. “We are delighted to welcome Codefi and CORI as Gold Sponsors for the Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities conference,” said Tamara Tateosian, chief executive officer of the chamber. “Their support underscores the importance of fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in rural communities, and we look forward to working together to make this year’s conference a resounding success.”

For more information about Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities, visit http://muext.us/CEC .

About Codefi

Codefi is a nationally recognized tech-based development non-profit organization that specializes in deploying an innovation ecosystem by building and attracting software-focused companies, educating and training tech talent and founders, and expanding the tech economy to improve the quality of lives, companies, and communities. Codefi and the efactory at Missouri State University, are co-creators of the Southern Missouri Innovation Network (Innovate SOMO), a regional collaborative working to unlock the full potential of entrepreneurship and innovation to transform entire communities in the southernmost 47 counties in Missouri.

The Center on Rural Innovation (CORI) is a national nonprofit committed to advancing economic prosperity in rural America through the creation of inclusive tech economy ecosystems that support scalable entrepreneurship and tech job creation. Established in 2017, CORI is at the heart of a dynamic social enterprise focused on closing the rural opportunity gap. To maximize all possible resources to address this critical problem, the organization partners with a taxable nonprofit, Rural Innovation Strategies, Inc. (RISI), and a seed fund, the CORI Innovation Fund, focused on early-stage technology companies located in rural areas. For more information, visit www.ruralinnovation.us .

Media Contact

Related programs.

• Connecting Entrepreneurial Communities

share this!

April 10, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

trusted source

Researcher: The quantum computer doesn't exist yet, but we are better understanding what problems it can solve

by Leiden University

How do we know what a quantum computer is good for when it hasn't been built yet? That's what Ph.D. candidate Casper Gyurik investigated by combining two terms you often hear: quantum computing and machine learning.

"I try to improve machine learning techniques using quantum," states Gyurik. Machine learning is a form of artificial intelligence in which a computer learns by itself. On normal—classical—computers, that is.

Quantum computing, on the other hand, is a groundbreaking new technique for performing computations on a quantum computer. This uses the physics of the smallest particles. "A useful version of that doesn't exist yet, but we can already simulate it mathematically on a classical computer."

"Great strides are made every year in building better quantum computers," says Gyurik. "Everyone is very enthusiastic, but we don't yet have a clear answer to the question of what we are going to do with them."

Classical versus quantum: Which is faster?

"Suppose you have a problem you want to solve. That data is nothing more than zeros and ones on a computer. I can then use a classical algorithm to get an answer to my question," Gyurik explains. "But now I am going to design a quantum algorithm to see if it produces the answer faster or more accurately. To do this, you have to translate the zeros and ones, put them into the quantum algorithm and translate the conclusions back to zeros and ones. A kind of quantum workaround. Then you can compare the results."

In this way, the doctoral candidate hunts for problems for which the quantum route is faster. "My favorite example is topological data analysis (TDA). That extracts the essence from large data sets. For example, a group of people with everyone's age, ethnicity, hair color, shoe size, and so on. TDA sees the data as a cloud of points with a particular shape. For certain shapes, we now suspect very strongly that quantum is indeed faster."

From financial crises to the human brain

Gyurik does not yet dare to say what the applications will be. But he does have an idea: "With this method you can analyze time series, for example for the financial sector . This data cloud changes shape drastically just before a crisis, so TDA can see a crisis coming in advance."

Another application lies in the area of complex networks. "I think one of the most interesting possibilities is the brain," he says. "You can describe that as a network of regions that are active during different activities. It might even be that one day we can better understand Alzheimer's with TDA, and there are signs that quantum can help with that."

"It's a fantastic time to be working on this topic. Larger, more useful quantum computers are coming along rapidly. Hopefully in the next few years we will get answers to what we can do with them. It's super inspiring that we all have a common goal," Gyurik reflects on his doctoral research. "I don't know yet what I will do next, but I will continue to work in quantum. That's for sure."

Explore further

Feedback to editors

Metasurface antenna could enable future 6G communications networks

4 hours ago

Making cement is very damaging for the climate. One solution is opening in California

12 hours ago

New computer vision tool can count damaged buildings in crisis zones and accurately estimate bird flock sizes

Apr 11, 2024

Engineers recreate Star Trek's Holodeck using ChatGPT and video game assets

Engineers quicken the response time for robots to react to human conversation

Researchers show electrical pulses can control thermal resistance in devices

New open-source generative machine learning model simulates future energy-climate impacts

Adding a telescopic leg beneath a quadcopter to create a hopping drone

Tiny AI-trained robots demonstrate remarkable soccer skills

Discovery brings all-solid-state sodium batteries closer to practical use

Related stories.

Researchers show classical computers can keep up with, and surpass, their quantum counterparts

Feb 9, 2024

How long before quantum computers can benefit society? That's Google's US$5 million question

Mar 27, 2024

Theory suggests quantum computers should be exponentially faster on some learning tasks than classical machines

Jun 10, 2022

Quantum computer works with more than zero and one

Jul 21, 2022

Entanglement unlocks scaling for quantum machine learning

Feb 24, 2022

Running quantum software on a classical computer

Aug 3, 2021

Recommended for you

AI-powered 'sonar' on smartglasses tracks gaze, facial expressions

Apr 10, 2024

Let us know if there is a problem with our content

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Tech Xplore in any form.

Your Privacy

This site uses cookies to assist with navigation, analyse your use of our services, collect data for ads personalisation and provide content from third parties. By using our site, you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use .

E-mail newsletter

• edWebinar Calendar
• edWebinar Recordings
• AI in Education
• Power of Purposeful Reading Practice Week 2024
• Elementary Writing Week 2024
• Science of Reading Week 2024
• Structured Literacy and Language Diversity Week
• Emergent Bilingual Week
• Mental Health & Wellness Week
• Earn Free CE Certificates
• edWeb K-12 State Approvals
• Early Childhood Approvals
• Professional Association Approvals
• Communities
• Create a PLC on edWeb for Your Teachers and Staff
• Best Practices Guide & Framework
• Case Studies: Virtual Professional Learning
• School District Members
• edWeb 2024 Professional Learning Survey
• About edWeb
• Advisory Board
• Press Releases
• Awards & Recognition
• Partners and Sponsors
• Testimonials
• Sponsorship Opportunities
• edWeb Tutorials
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Accessibility Information
• Member Login

News & Views from edWeb

Solving Math Problems and Negative Feelings About Math

Watch the Recording Listen to the Podcast

As students progress through the upper elementary grades and into middle school, many are becoming caught in a negative feedback loop, with their limited understanding of math facts and underlying concepts resulting in poor grades and a lack of engagement, making successful math learning even less likely to occur.

Ways to teach math effectively and engage students in math learning were discussed during the edLeader Panel “ Differentiate Elementary Math Instruction to Increase Engagement and Flexibility: Build Your Toolbox .”

Alexa Poulin, Customer Marketing Manager at Unruly Studios and panel moderator, shared poll results about key challenges educators face when teaching math, and the data showed more than half of the educators found their students did not have the number sense and foundational knowledge needed for high-level thinking about math. Many educators also felt that math classes were not engaging and that many students were performing at levels that were multiple grades below their state standards.

Developing Math Knowledge and Positive Attitudes

The panelists agreed that students struggling with math need a fundamental understanding of how numbers work and relate to each other. Building a solid foundation of knowledge about base 10 and place value is crucial, as students can then apply that knowledge when solving math problems and thereby gain confidence and further engage in math learning.

Emma Simmons, Principal of Roxbury Prep Charter School (MA), discussed the importance of developing a culture of confidence and error acceptance in math classes so that a fear of failure does not lead to a lack of engagement and learning. This can be accomplished by encouraging discussions about how errors were found and what can be done to correct them. This way, errors are perceived as a routine part of the learning process, and any gaps in students’ understanding can be identified and remedied.

Another key part of the process is showing students that there is often more than one way to solve a math problem, and encouraging a willingness to try different approaches even if the students are not sure their answers will be correct. Students also need to be taught to “think holistically” about math problems, by considering what the problem is asking, what needs to be solved, and which steps need to be taken to arrive at a correct answer.

Strategies to Increase Learning and Engagement

To engage students in learning and flexible thinking, Elijah Ortiz, Fifth-Grade Educator and Teacher Leader at Concourse Village Elementary School (NY), explained three different strategies, all of which use a three-part approach. A “3-act task” can start with a brief video that students then discuss, after which additional information and a question are presented and prompt students to discuss how they should proceed and why. The third part of the process is revealing the answer and exploring different ways the answer can be found.

A “3-read protocol” is an approach to word problems that starts with reading a word problem like a story in order to determine what is happening and improve students’ comprehension of the problem. The second step is a choral reading that is followed by consideration of potential problem-solving strategies. The third step is another choral reading that includes the ending question to ensure understanding of the content.

The third approach is known as a “CRA frame,” in which students progress from a Concrete experience to a Representational one and then an Abstract one. This can start with the use of manipulatives, then proceed to students doing a drawing, and finally to the students performing a written math function or solving an equation.

Emily Semrad, Elementary Educator at Academy Adventures Midtown Charter School (AZ), pointed out that math vocabulary can be a crucial obstacle for students, creating confusion when the students encounter and try to differentiate between words such as “numerator” and “denominator.” To develop math vocabulary, she recommends starting with a brief video that students can just listen to and watch. Next, there can be a class discussion about what they saw and heard, including any familiar or unfamiliar terms. Students can then be encouraged to define key terms, write notes about them, and discuss them in relation to the math processes they are learning.

Semrad also has found that teamwork and competition can be effective ways to engage students in math learning and practice. One technique is a “relay race” in which students are divided into groups, and each member of a group is responsible for performing one part of a math function or providing one part of a solution to a word problem. There can also be a competition to see which group can come up with the most ways to solve a problem, thereby reinforcing the creative thinking that can lead to math solutions.

Through these and other techniques, educators can engage students in continuing to increase their knowledge and conceptual understanding of math, as well as becoming more engaged in the learning process.

Learn more about this edWeb broadcast, Differentiate Elementary Math Instruction to Increase Engagement and Flexibility: Build Your Toolbox , sponsored by  Unruly Studios

Join the Community

Building Understanding in Mathematics is a free professional learning community that provides a platform, advice and support in helping educators learn methods that help students build understanding in mathematics.

Unruly Studios combines high-quality STEM learning with active recess-style play for K-8 schools and districts. Our award-winning Unruly Splats platform introduces students to computer science through the creation of physically active games in our block-based coding app. Unruly Math is a supplemental K-5 math program that reinforces foundational math skills through active, experiential group play using the Unruly Splats platform. Unruly Math infuses kinesthetic learning and peer-to-peer collaboration into your school’s existing math curriculum with a scope and sequence of 80 standards-aligned activities. The Unruly Splats platform can be utilized for various subject areas from STEAM, to math, to ELA, making it the perfect tool to create engaging summer programs for students and teachers. Splats are made to be stomped on and are iPad and Chromebook compatible.

Article by Robert Low , based on this edLeader Panel

Related Posts

Comments are closed.

Upcoming edWebinars

True inclusion with universal design for learning: designing to the edges, teaching reading fluency: the art and science behind it, building educator relationships: they make a difference, innovations in empathy: a multidimensional, dynamic approach to building empathy, ai, the digital landscape, and misinformation-busting superpowers for students.