The Creativity Seminar

On the 2nd and 3rd of February, the EMA (Ecole des Mines d’Alès) hosted its annual Creativity Seminar, a meeting for students of various schools to be taught methods and techniques to innovate, using the imagination of a group rather than a single person.

This event’s main organizer is Michel Ferlut, the Economic Development Director of our school, who did all kinds of meetings and courses on creativity and innovation over the years.

After a presentation on the topic of innovation to warm us up, representatives from numerous companies such as Total, Cora or SNCF would take a group of approximately ten students and teach them over 10 hours their own methods and their experiences.

The meeting ended on a bright note, students participated in a Flash Mob on the song “Different kind of prostitute” by Chilly Gonzales, Mr. Ferlut cheerfully gave us one joke after another and we could hear the schools sing their “hymns”.

But the end of the meeting isn’t the end of our creative work. Companies would now put students’ imagination to the test with the Creativity Challenge. Each company gave a theme and objective to work on. Students of the EMA have now 5 weeks to offer a solution to their problems. The students with the most successful ideas would receive various rewards from the companies such as mediatisation or privileged partnerships.

As apprentices, we have a different challenge to take on. On the subject of the RICA, we have one week to come with innovative ideas and present them in the form of a Pecha-Kucha (automatically transiting diapositives, 20 pictures x 20 seconds each).

Each group used the techniques they learned during the seminar to find solutions with no limitation by reality. The Pecha-Kucha will be presented the Friday 10th of February before the school’s teachers.

We hope some of our ideas will be the start of bigger innovations in the future.

NB : A fun fact is that “Seminar” comes directly from the Latin word “Seminarium” which translates in English to “plant nursery”, a fitting metaphor on the theme of creativity if you imagine an idea is like a plant.