Chapter 3

Creativity & Innovation

Theoretical Introduction – Theory Behind the Scenarios

This chapter includes workshop scenarios aiming at developing young people’s ‘Creativity and Innovation’ competence, as defined by P21’s Framework for 21st Century Learning (Partnership for 21st Century Learning, 2002). The workshops were designed so that all the Creativity and Innovation competence areas from the P21 framework are covered, and young people could acquire new knowledge and develop new specific skills, enhancing their creativity and innovation. Here are the competence areas you should get familiar with as they are relevant throughout the workshop scenarios, which you will conduct:

  • Think creatively
    • Use a wide range of idea creation techniques (such as brainstorming);
    • Create new and worthwhile ideas (both incremental and radical concepts);
    • Elaborate, refine, analyse and evaluate their own ideas in order to improve and maximize creative efforts.
  • Work creatively with others
    • Develop, implement and communicate new ideas to others effectively;
    • Be open and responsive to new and diverse perspectives; incorporate group input and feedback into the work;
    • Demonstrate originality and inventiveness in work and understand the real world limits to adopting new ideas;
    • View failure as an opportunity to learn; understand that creativity and innovation is a long-term, cyclical process of small successes and frequent mistakes.
  • Implement innovations
    • Act on creative ideas to make a tangible and useful contribution to the field in which the innovation will occur.

As the Skill IT for Youth Training Toolkit also aims at developing the digital skills of young people, almost every scenario includes a digital component, from using a specific app or software, to using digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets, laptops or digital cameras.

In the following sections, to help you deliver the workshops, we will also present some basic knowledge and information on specific topics used in the scenarios, such as creativity myths, creativity principles, and the concepts of intelligent fast failure, design thinking, etc. What we present should be enough for you to deliver any of the workshops immediately, but we can imagine that you are a curious youth worker. For that reason, we also included some additional resources from which you can learn more about the topics.

Next Part > Basics on creativity