On Radical Creativity

Right.

So I know that the center has collaborations with the industry, right? And then, of course, the students.

How are the projects structured? How does the process work to use creativity as a tool, as a methodology?

Well, we actually want to do as we teach.

So we are not defining the projects or the processes too much beforehand.

So we are actually building up the Center for Radical Creativity and we are opening as collaboration platform.

to societal partners and companies that want to come to us and together really think that, okay, how can we think differently? How can we challenge the assumptions? How can we change the paradigms and also thinking about, OK, how do we do that together so that we are not selling a kind of a consulting process where we would say, OK, this is what you get and this is what it costs.

But we really want to keep it open ended and open the platform for our collaboration partners.

And to be frank, we are in early days.

We set up the center about a year ago.

The whole concept of radical creativity has existed at Aalto University for five years now.

But the center is quite a new addition to what we are doing.

Wonderful.

So I know that you've also defined creativity as a methodology, right? And that sounds very interesting.

How does that work as a methodology? Are there specific tools that you suggest or approaches?

Well, me personally, I'm looking into the leadership of creativity and how do we build a culture of creativity.

So I'm seeing it more as a culture and philosophy rather than set of tools or methodologies.

And design thinking became big 15, 20 years ago, and many companies sort of did design thinking and then they could tick the box.

Okay, now we've done creativity and now we are creative, but nothing really maybe changed.

And now we are pushing beyond that, saying that we really need to influence how companies are structured, how organizations are structured, how we think about leadership, how we think about our work processes, etc.

So it's not so much about tools or methodology, but it's really more about culture and rethinking the ways in which we operate.

Wonderful, right? It's, it's like, if we can influence the culture, the way we would influence the solutions is becomes a byproduct of that, isn't it?

Yes, exactly.

And we, we come from the starting point that everyone is creative.

We often have this notion that only artists or researchers or R&D people or advertising people are creative.