Creative Session Plan

As second year students at BGI we are asked to facilitate a "Creativity Session" in which we select a focus question that we are interested in and bring together a diverse group of knowledgeable people to do the brainwork for you. For my session I decided to investigate the barriers to and innovative solutions around stimulating broad-based community investment. The following is my session plan, I'll follow up with the findings in a subsequent post:

Statement of focus
In what ways might we further connect local investors with local entrepreneurs?

There are a few perceived needs that this session would like to address. The first is that our investment dollars are nearly all leaving our communities. The second is that many people in our communities cannot or do not access capital to launch their ideas for businesses and projects.

Criteria for successful solutions

Must Criteria:
• The investor and entrepreneur are in the same city/region
• Maintains an attractive level of risk
• Provides some financial return / has a payback mechanism

Desirable Criteria:
• Inspires/encourages aspiring entrepreneurs to take action
• Creates new aspiring entrepreneurs
• Remains within the bounds of the current SEC regulations

Brainstorming Questions

These are questions that I asked the participants to consider before arriving to the session.
o Where do our community’s investment dollars go?
o How would you define local investment?
o What are the pros and cons of local investing?
o What are the barriers to accessing capital for entrepreneurs in our community?
o What are the criteria that private investors use to identify investment opportunities?
o How might we effectively communicate the potential benefits and tradeoffs of local investing to our community?

Session Plan

Welcome and introductions (10 mins)
I will welcome everyone, introduce myself and ask them to give a brief description of their background

Creative orientation (10mins)
I will reiterate the creative idea and read the brainstorm questions from the briefing document. This is also where I will establish the rules of the creative session, especially encouraging the use of the note cards for ideas at any point.

Silent, rapid idea generation (5 mins)
The participants will write down on a sheet of paper as many ideas as they can think of.

Round robin of favorite ideas (10 mins)
I will then ask each participant in turn to share their favorite idea and write them down on note cards to model the behavior. I will ask for no comments or judgment during this phase, just ideas. We may have to go around a few times.

Open brainstorming (25 mins)
This section will hopefully flow nicely from the round robin, however if the session stalls then I will employ one of the following techniques for spurring creativity:
• The escape method : I will make the statement that, ‘no one is concerned about getting any return on their investment.’
• The stepping-stone method: I will ask someone to read one of their ideas from their dump and ask everyone to answer the question, ‘what is good about that idea?’

Debrief and Adjourning (10 mins)
Here I will thank everyone for their participation and ask them to each say what worked and what didn’t about the session