A wrap-up of the past Creative Incubator Rome’19: new problem-solving approaches for society

The Creative Incubator, in partnership with the Art Directors Club of Europe, took place with great success from the 28th to the 30th of March. As the well-known saying goes, all roads lead to the eternal city of Rome. And so, our 23 creatives from 11 different countries found their way to Pi School to attend the first out of three modules. Under the guidance of our lecturers Jamshid Alamuti, Rey Andrade, Conn Bertish and Axel Quack, the participants worked closely together for three intensive days.

The mission of these three days was to use creativity to come up with solutions to real-world problems. And to do so, the participants started by focusing on the main concerns each one of us sees or experiences daily.

Kickoff of the program was to start with the basic task of defining creativity. In this context, Jamshid Alamuti (CEO and Co-Founder at Pi School) made one point clear: all humans are creative, meaning it is not a matter of genetics but practice. As an ice-breaker, the creatives developed a self-assessment illustrating their strengths, desired improvements and blank spaces for comments and feedback. These personal profiles were updated and modified during the whole programme allowing the participants to grow and to get to know each other better.

Our speakers fed the participants with valuable expert knowledge, latest insights and trends enlightening the construct creativity from different viewpoints. As creativity is subjective, developing reasoning and a sensibility for what is good or bad is a lifetime learning process and essential in the creative scene.

When designing or working on a new idea, Rey Andrade (Creative Director at 72andSunny) recommends looking at it from two different views: as a human and as a robot. Considering this, emotional impressions and critical thinking enable a 360-degree perspective to make the idea tangible and impactful for the users.

One of the best role models showing how creativity can be applied in all fields is Conn Bertish (Founder of Cancer Dojo). His personal experience as a cancer survivor leads him to the philosophy of sharing one another own learnings to shift behaviour for the better. Based on his background and his belief that creativity and technology combined pull people out of a helpless state, he created the pioneering and successful App Cancer Dojo. Following his motto: “happy people are harder to kill”, the main purpose of the App is to empower people fighting cancer.

Finding the right approach and solution which deliver a meaningful social impact, is essential to meet users’ needs and create innovations based on the fundamentals of human-centred design and customer experience. In this continuously forward-moving environment, Axel Quack (Strategy Director at frog) underlines that the innovation process does not necessarily need to be accelerated, but that gradual developments lead to great solutions too.

The big challenge of this module was to start identifying some of the main problems of our society and brainstorm possible solutions. After an intense three days, the groups pitched their preliminary ideas regarding education, data safety, social care and healthcare.

The upcoming module of the Creative Incubator in Barcelona will give a more concrete shape to all ideas that emerged from this first debate. Creativity will be used to go beyond advertising campaigns, proposing integrated design and technology products and services that can go out to the world and have a real impact on society.

If you are jumping on your seat thinking of how many ideas you have that could make a difference, then apply now for one of the grants and see you in Barcelona!

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