Few weeks ago I promised my friends to share our
study experience in University of Nottingham (UoN). It is definitely a whole
different study experience for me here compared to my previous ones. I don't
know if it's just my mood, the cultures that shapes the people's personality
and way of thinking, the study environment, or the lecturers who are very great
at delivering their modules. But for sure, It just takes me to another new
level! Kinda funny because somehow it always drives my excitement to wake
up in the morning to receive new knowledge. When things are really exciting and
steal my focus, I barely jump into my phone. It's an excellent indication I
supposed. Except for the part when I don't have
enough sleep at night and get very sleepy in the class. LOL. But I can tackle
this issue very easily. Thanks for the nearby coffee shop for making me
befriends with coffee. XD
My main purpose of writing this is to
share my study experience in Entrepreneurship and Creativity module. It is the
first module taught in autumn semester. In my opinion, it was indeed a
very important yet interesting module for me to deepen my basic understanding
about entrepreneurship and creativity. In this module, we were given 2
assignments. The first one is individual reflective essay writing which basically asks
us to evaluate all the things that have been taught in the class, including the
theoretical and practical knowledge, frameworks used to deliver the knowledge,
group work experience, etc. Meanwhile the second assignment is group assignment
which allows us to implement all the theoretical learning experience into
practice. It's kinda similar with group business challenge. However, this post will
firstly cover my personal understanding of entrepreneurship and creativity in
regards with my study experience in class, some reading materials and various
entrepreneurship talks.
A little glimpse of my current artworks and some reading materials
The first class of this module was started with an
introduction about entrepreneurship. We were asked to list down our own
definition of entrepreneurship. Some mentioned about characteristics and
skills needed by an entrepreneur like risk taker, problem solver, adaptive,
opportunistic, proactive, and so on. All of these are actually very critical to
becoming a successful entrepreneur. There are variant definitions of entrepreneurship
described by the scholars depending on the time period (because
entrepreneurship has been gradually developed since the establishment of
agriculture era until now). In a nutshell, entrepreneurship is defined as
a process practiced by a person by discovering opportunities. Unlike the
normal people, entrepreneurs take opportunities into different level.
Entrepreneur is interpreted as a person who is alert to the market opportunity
and come up with creative ideas and then turn them into business. However it is very
important for an entrepreneur to exercise entrepreneurial skills in order to gain
maximum profit.
I was very fascinated by the theory of intellectual
capital introduced by my lecturer. It consists of human
capital, social capital, and organizational capital. The effectiveness of a
business’ organizational management is depending on maximizing the use of
them. Human capital is the knowledge and skills (intangible assets) of an
entrepreneur which has big potential to exploit financial capital (the tangible
assets). Development of human capital increases the capability of a business to
generate profit. As an entrepreneur, sometimes I worry if my entrepreneurial
skills is very lacking to develop my ideas and business. In fact, it is not the
only thing I should think of. We should not forget the significance of human
interaction in the social life, because networking is also very crucial to our
business. Social capital enables human capital to realize its
potential, besides it also helps entrepreneurs to generate conducive
market environment and widen their market coverage. OK, now it starts to sound very
serious haha.
To be honest, I am always enthusiastic to learn
about human psychology. And this module somehow drives me even more crazily. Do
you know that everyone has different nature on processing knowledge and
solving a problem? Since we were given a group project (business challenge
assignment), we should be divided into groups. In the group formation process,
Mr. Chris Mahon divided us into groups based on the result of Human Brain
Dominance Instrument (HBDI) test. It's some kinda psychological instrument used
to identify our thinking preference. By taking this test, I get to know what my
profile is and what skills I need to enhance in regards with entrepreneurship.
In the group, we all have different HBDI profiles, however this diversity helps
us to comprehend each other's strengths and weaknesses. I was in the group with
people whom I got to learn a lot from. Each of them has unique personality, education
background and professional experience. I even learned how to embrace
multiculturalism in this short period of time. How cool
that is! :)
In term of defining creativity, people also have
different way of defining it. In simple term, creativity is the process of
bringing up ideas into use. According to Mark A. Runco, it is correlated
with intelligence, imagination, originality, and
effectiveness. Intelligence encourages a person’s creativity. Due to the
concept of radical innovation, originality plays huge contribution and hard to
separate from creativity because creative things are always original. Moreover,
original things must be effective to be creative. It takes the form of
usefulness in an innovation. This effectiveness must also consider the fact
that valuable products and ideas depending on what the market needs.
In accordance with radical innovation, we often
discussed about Joseph Schumpeter's idea of radical innovation in the
class. He appeared with an extraordinary theory of entrepreneurship. He
pointed out the significant role of entrepreneurs in economic development and
the emergence of radical innovation as creative destruction. Schumpeter
also defined entrepreneur as an innovator who brings radical changes through
the introduction of new technological process or product. He valued the novelty
of an innovation as genuine outcome of radical innovation. If it’s hard for you
to get the meaning of radical innovation, we can take an example of the
emergence of Media Player (as if MP3) which totally replaced the used of
Compact Disc (CD). This technology is considered very radical since it provides a
whole different experience of listening to music compare to CD. It also changed
the culture of people listening to music. The originality of this radical
innovation enables us to add as many music collections as we want in the form of
soft files (this easiness is original and never existed before). Therefore we
don't have to worry carrying a lot of CDs to listen to variant songs.
The emergence of radical innovation is
a result of lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is almost the same
with the concept of thinking out of the box. As a decision maker, entrepreneurs
are required to see things from different angles. Besides, it allows us to be
flexible and explorative by solving problems with different perceptions,
patterns, and methods. I found the concept of lateral thinking is similar
with divergent thinking which involves generating multiple alternative
solutions and unexpected combinations. Divergent thinking is very
important because of its tendency to produce novel ideas. Meanwhile convergent
thinking is more oriented to single best answer, emphasize on the accurancy,
speed and logic.
I recently read a book entitled “Oh My
Goodness: A Personal Guide to become Creative Junkies” written by Indonesian
author, Yoris Sebastian. I can’t give full review to this book because I
haven’t finished reading it. At my first glance, I can tell that this book is
like one of those anti-mainstream books (it’s written in both English and Bahasa
Indonesia, plus the design is simply fresh yet eye catchy). It helps us to
brainstorm and enhance our creativity. I found some similarities from how he
elaborated things in his book with what I learn in campus, especially the part
where he encouraged the reader to “Push the Limit”. Mr. Chris Mahon mentioned
this phrase several times in class. One of the best quotes I get inspired from to realize it in my real life. Ah, can’t wait to finish reading this book. For my Indonesian
friends, I suggest you to read the english version of this book. Don’t worry
about the language, because it’s easy to understand. I bet you’ll learn a lot,
hehe. KEEP PUSHING YOUR LIMIT!!
Another important aspect in
entrepreneurship that I want to highlight here is opportunity recognition. What
makes entrepreneurs different is the ability to recognize the gap occurred in
our surroundings, inspect the behaviour within many factors (economy, social,
political, technological advances, etc.). As problem solvers,
entrepreneurs tend to see problems in their society as their opportunities by
providing the solutions. That’s why entrepreneurs are seen to be the key of
economic development. Besides creating job opportunities to a lot of people,
entrepreneurs encourage the establishment of innovations used to ease our life.
So, that’s some bits of my learning
experience. It’s an absolute recommendation for you to learn from other resources like read a lot of inspiring books, watch several motivational talks from
the internet, and/or come to entrepreneurship seminars/conference to enrich
your knowledge. Mark Wright (The Apprentice winner), who is a dyslexic once
said “If you wanna earn more, you’ve got to learn more. When people leave
formal education, on average they read one book for the rest of their life.
While the CEOs of the Fortune 500 companies on average read one book per week”.
Despite of his learning difficulties, Mark does not stop pursuing his dreams and keep learning by listening to audio books in any chance that he can get. Here is a
bonus for you all, a (half) documentation of his talk during Nottingham
Entrepreneurs Conference.
Special credits to my lecturers; Mr. Chris Mahon, MBA, Dr. Chris Carter, Prof Simon Mosey, and Mr. Paul Kirkham
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