Innovation Playground
What is the Innovation Playground?
The Innovation Playground is an innovative and collaborative project between Kingston University Business School and businesses looking to leverage creativity and diverse thinking in their business. The motivation behind the programme is to reintroduce a spirit of playful creativity into the realms of learning and problem-solving for students and businesses alike.
The programme runs in iterations; each iteration runs for 8 weeks and pairs a diverse team of students with a business, to collaboratively explore a business problem that has been resistant to resolution.
Creative problem solving
The students receive specialist Design Thinking training and mentoring throughout the programme. Each team of students partners with a business in an iterative fashion to explore a problem and generate creative options. The collaborative partnership may find solutions, reframe the problem, generate better questions or uncover new paths that render the original problem redundant.
The experience doesn't end there—students are invited back for subsequent iterations, where they transition into mentors for new participants, eventually graduating to train the next generation of students.
The Innovation Playground is committed to practising what it preaches. We believe in "eating our own dog food," learning from each iteration and adapting the programme in real-time. This is achieved through active engagement with our students and partner businesses, allowing their insights to shape and refine the program as it evolves.
Get in touch and find out more
If you would like to know more please contact one of us below:
- Programme director: Dr Bahare Afrahi
Email: B.Afrahi@kingston.ac.uk - Student liaison: Maliha Haider
Email: S.M.Haider@kingston.ac.uk - Business liaison: Glenn Bowering
Email: G.Bowering@kingston.ac.uk
