To the Mall...for Class?

One part of the College Program is the "Learning" component. Disney offers specialized classes for us to participate in to earn college credit while on the program. My class, Creativity and Innovation, is unique because it is all about thinking creatively and how to innovate in a professional atmosphere.

This week we were focused on taking everything we've learned over the weeks and observing how companies, other than Disney, add these ideas into their daily operations. So we headed to the Florida Mall. We were given questions to ask at 6 or 7 stores in order to observe how their creative process works. We visited so many different stores with different outlooks on creativity and sales. It was very interesting to listen to the employees of different companies to see how they are encouraged to add creativity to their stores. Every store was different and most of the employees were happy to talk to us.

After we observed a variety of stores, each group had to come up with a new store concept that combined at least two concepts we saw played out in the mall. We took the color organization process from Charming Charlies and aspect of product scent from M&M World and combined them to create a store concept for a cupcake shop organized by cupcake flavors and scents. We had so much fun coming up with the idea and by the end we were wishing that it would be something real.

This class has been full of creating new ideas and thinking about how to creatively improve not only things we see outside of Disney but also new ideas that would creatively enhance our own workplaces. We have also been required to keep an idea journal throughout the entire class and it has allowed my mind to expand on a few creative ideas I had thought about in the past but then never came back to. Each week we would learn about something new in the world of creativity or innovation and by the end we found out that everything built off the thing we had learned during the previous week. I have really enjoyed this class and now we are starting to work on our final group projects. My group is sticking to the store idea and for our final project we will have to pitch our idea to a specific group of people. Challenge accepted.

Hope you're having a magical day, I know I am!