principles, their individual creativity skills, as well as other related team skills, such as communication, teamwork and problem- solving. Immediately after the one-day workshop, they were again asked to rate themselves using a similar questionnaire. A final evaluation took place three months after the workshop. Students were asked to first think back to their initial skills level before the workshop and then rate their current (i.e. three months after workshop) skills level. This is important as it has been shown that participants in a training workshop might give very high ratings immediately after the workshop, since they enjoyed it very much, but may after a period of time discover that no real skills transfer has taken place. On the
other hand, they may also have rated their own skills before the workshop unrealistically (or immodestly?) high’.
As Figure 2 (below) shows, the researchers found that all participants rated their skills immediately after the workshop (O2), significantly higher than before (O1); and that these new skills were ‘durable’, as they stayed high three months after the time (O3 After). The rating scale was 1 = low to 5 = high. An interesting finding is also that they realised three months later that they had rated their knowledge before the workshop (O1) higher than it actually
was (O3 Before – to be compared with O1), which suggests that they were somewhat overconfident of their creativity skills initially. Figure 2 shows the boxplot for Creative Ability as an example. The results for the other creative skills measured were similar, when comparing average scores for all three student groups on Knowledge of Creativity and Innovation Skills, Communication Skills, Teamwork and Problem-solving.
82 Management Today | September 2012
Required for effective brain
Reduce anxiety
David Rock strategies
SynNovation tools to meet requirements
Reduce information Structure of process and tools in prefontal cortex Activate other parts of brain
All ideas are captured
All senses involved in various ‘excursions’ and tools
Increase alertness Noradrenaline, Norepinaphrine
Increase INTEREST GRATIFICATION Dopamine
Create urgency Visualise and
verbalise the ‘scary’
Novelty, humour Changing
perspectives
Simple, clear task statements Time limits to solve problems
Target to generate many ideas Listening for, building on ideas
Expectation for newness Humour in sharing connections
thought triggers, Variety of excursions, Using different techniques
Table 1:
Managing optimal neurochemistry for performance: Achieving Rock strategies by using SynNovation principles
Innovation skills for Food Science students
A similar study was done with a group of 23 final year students in Food Science. They also participated in a one-day Toolbox for Brainwaves workshop, with similar pre- and post-assessments to the BCom students. These results were similar, despite the fact that the BCom students had had previous exposure to creativity training as students in entrepreneurship.
Innovation and product development are key skills in food science. SynNovation regularly gives bursaries to attend a two-day Thinking, Innovation and Problem-solving Skills (TIPS!) workshop (formerly WITS!) to one member of the winning groups in product development projects in the final year BSc in Food Science. A condition is that s/he shares the skills with group mates. A professor who knows the process says when she sees groups working on projects, she can see if they have had the benefit of exposure to SynNovation. Here are comments (in 2011) from the first recipient of this bursary, now working in R&D:
“I attended the SynNovation WITS! workshop in 2008, and learnt some valuable tools for generating innovative ideas for my product development project at Stellenbosch University. In the second term product development project our group used the tools to generate ideas and the tools worked because we ended up winning the prize for the most marketable product. have graduated now and been working for
I The Innovation Journal
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