Welcome 2010!

To start the blog for the first week of 2010, at first all the best wishes for the New Year! I hope it will be an inspiring, creative and successful year. With a little retrospect on 2009 we prepare ourselves for the future.

December was a busy month. Besides of course all the great Christmas parties and New Years Eve we were all very busy with studying for our second exam, assessment and some of us with preparing their book presentations. Looking back on this month and being honest, we were all looking forward to our well deserved vacation.

2009 was the year in which we all chose to participate in a new challenging program, each of us with different reasons for being here. Despite, or even because of this we became a very strong group within a short period of time: we support each other, we have fun together, learn a lot together and co-create our futures. I believe the reason for that is because we share a passion: Imagineering!
Enough with praising 2009, we now live in 2010!

Week 1 was a good start into the second phase, Organisation Transformation: Innovation Management was introduced to us by Sören Kaplan. Wow, this guy is very interesting! What he taught the first day seemed to be quite simple, easy and fun. In the end though, it all turned out to have an important message beyond: look out of the box.

By acting according to the rules, doing things the way they are always done, you set your focus on just one thing. Of course focus is good but it could be that you might missing some important things that happen around you. For a company to keep up with the world it is acting in it is important to not just focus on processing your own actions but look around and see what is happening outside your company. The world around you is part of your future and you have to be aware of that there is more than just one perspective.

This day already enlightened us in this new year and gave us refreshing input from that American guy who seems to be quite successful as he is working with many big companies such as HP and Colgate. After that external input, we provided ourselves with our own input: we students finished the day with our book presentations. ‘Grown up digital, One fine line, What’s the secret and the Creative city’ - we all shared the most important parts of the content with each other.

I did a presentation about the book ‘Grown up digital’. It is about meeting the ‘Net Generation’ (the so-called ‘Generation X’ which has grown up with internet, computers, iPod, Facebook etc.). The book’s bottom line is that if you understand this generation, you will understand the future. I found it an really interesting, easy to read book and if you are not a part of the Net Generation I would definitely recommend reading it to take a look into the heads of this new generation. Same the other way around: for those who have grown up digital it is worthy to see that not everything we take for granted in today’s digital world is obvious the way it is. Also the fact that we can handle all the digital stuff easily is not as easy for everybody.

Thursday and Friday we also had interesting lectures of Sören Kaplan. He taught us a lot about business models and on Friday we spent the whole day very appreciative in the workshop of appreciative inquiry. These three days were already very inspiring to me; I learned a lot of useful theories and techniques to apply later on in my application company. For me it is very helpful that he uses a lot of examples and lets us practice with several techniques. Next week we have one more day to go with him and I know for sure that even now that it is very cold outside with all the snow and ice, it wouldn’t bother me to leave my warm bed to be present at the Imagineering Academy.

To close down the week I want to say that it was good and felt nice to have a couple of days off, but now we are all back in business I remember again why I am here. Every day is an inspiring, creative and definitely a challenging day, so I can’t wait to see what’s next.

Lieke van der Zanden