Innovation Tournament

In case you want to bring up something new in lessons, engage your teen students and build a fire in them, organise an innovation tournament. Nowadays, innovation tournaments have become the most popular and effective way of boosting the creativity of students. The most popular Innovation Tournament is the one provided by Stanford University. However, loads of big companies and educational institutions have already followed their example. In this article, we would like to share some ideas on the organisation of an Innovation Tournament in your class.

An example of the task that Stanford students once got: to earn as much money as possible, having just $5 of seed funding and 2 hours time limit. Students were given the task and an envelope with $5 in it, they were allowed to come up with ideas from Wednesday evening to Sunday, however, they had only 2 hours to earn money after they’ve opened an envelope. On Monday, they had to give a 3-minute presentation on their results. Apart from thinking out some obvious solutions, like participating in a lottery or buying some basic equipment for opening a car wash, students presented some extraordinary ways of raising money, and some of them even didn’t spend a cent! Among unusual solutions there were: 

• booking tables on Friday evening and selling places for $20 to those who wanted to spend time at a restaurant.
• measuring pressure in bicycle tyres and inflation of the tyres which needed that for the kind donation. 
• organizing photoshoot at a ball;
• creating maps showing the location of restaurants on campus and selling them to students’ parents during a guest weekend
• and many other great ideas. 

Some students raised more than $600 with no investment. This task developed students’ basics of entrepreneurial thinking and boosted their creativity.

Why should you organise such tournaments in class?

An Innovation Tournament may allow your students to bring their talent to life. They will practice brainstorming, they will need to unlock their creational potential. Each member of the team will go through all stages of the implementation of the project: from idea to the final results report. These are skills that your students may need in the future adult life, not book-learned theory.

From the point of view of developing students’ language skills, the idea is that students are able to apply the functional language necessary for discussions and for making a presentation. Moreover, if brainstorming is held right at the lesson, students practise speaking for fluency, as well as making notes in English. An Innovation Tournament can be held at the end of a module or term. The task of the teacher is to plan it in advance, think about the language students will be using in the lesson and after it, the outcomes students will get. Thus to make it possible pre-teach the target vocabulary, grammar and functional language. The task and the format can be different depending on the goal of your Tournament.

What can you do in your class?

In order to organize an Innovation Tournament in your class, you should not necessarily sponsor your students and give them $5. There are a lot of things they can do to demonstrate not just excellent teamwork, problem-solving, creativity and organization, but also skills of performing projects and the presentation of the results:

• put 10 paper clips (or Post-its, or erasers, or pencils — whatsoever) in envelopes, and tell the teams that over the next few days they have four hours to create the maximum amount of “value” with these paper clips, and this value could be measured in any way convenient for them. The main idea is not only exchange paper clips on something or create something using them, but to prove or demonstrate the value of what they’ve reached. With Post-its students can create some project-presentation, they can use paper-clips to build a modern sculpture, exchange them for something, create a video — the result is bound only by their imagination.
• think of an unusual application of usual things and present it to other teams so that they want to buy it. These could be some school or household objects. 
• identify the problem at school that students would like to solve (it can be a brainstorm with all teams). Then they should invent the best solution for the problem.

If you want to learn more about Innovation Tournaments, as well as creativity and innovations, you can read books What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 by Tina Seelig and Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities by Christian Terwiesch.

Tips on innovation tournament in your class

• Provide clear instructions;
• Make sure that students have time and opportunities to perform the task. Dedicate some time at the lesson for students to brainstorm;
• The fewer rules — the better. Rules restrict creativity;
• Ensure that students understand what result they need to reach. Give them a clear example.

An example of Innovation Tournament Winner’s idea