Innovation becomes useful when a team can turn ideas into action.
As explored in How Teams Make Room for New Ideas, creativity begins with the conditions a team creates. People need opportunities to share early thinking, listen to different perspectives, develop ideas together, and learn through testing.
The next step is practice.
A shared experience gives people a focused challenge in which these behaviours become visible. Participants need to imagine, choose, build, adjust, and deliver something together.
The programme supports the outcome, but the outcome remains the starting point.
What Innovation & Creativity looks like at work
Innovation is not limited to major inventions or transformation projects. It appears in the everyday ways teams improve services, respond to customers, solve problems, communicate ideas, and adapt to new priorities.
An innovative and creative team can:
- Generate different responses to a challenge
- Build on ideas from different people
- Turn abstract thinking into a visible concept
- Experiment before committing to a complete solution
- Use constraints as prompts for new thinking
- Adapt when new information emerges
- Explain an idea clearly
- Balance originality with practical delivery
These behaviours require imagination, communication, decision-making, and coordinated action.
When a team is ready to strengthen this outcome
Innovation & Creativity may be a useful focus when a team is:
- Planning a new strategy, product, or campaign
- Looking for broader participation in decision-making
- Bringing different functions together
- Working through a recurring challenge
- Encouraging people to challenge familiar assumptions
- Preparing for organisational or technological change
- Designing a conference around future priorities
- Building confidence in experimentation
A clear brief identifies where creative thinking needs to improve the way the team works.
The objective might be to involve more functions in early-stage planning, test ideas sooner, communicate new concepts more clearly, or help people recognise how different strengths improve an idea.
That clarity makes it easier to select the right experience.
Creating one shared vision
Some experiences help teams understand how separate contributions become one collective result.
In The Big Picture, participants paint individual canvases that eventually form a large-scale artwork. Each group is responsible for its own section, but colours, lines, and details must align across the complete image.
The experience makes interdependence visible. Individual contributions matter, but the final result depends on communication and a shared understanding of the whole.
Bridging the Divide creates a similar lesson through construction. Teams design and build separate sections of a bridge that must connect successfully. Participants work with specifications, resources, deadlines, and customer-supplier relationships while also finding creative ways to design their section.
The final structure demonstrates how ideas and decisions made by one group affect everyone else.
Building and performing together
Dragon Squad combines design, construction, music, choreography, and performance.
Participants organise into specialist groups to create a Chinese dragon and prepare a coordinated Dragon Dance. Each group can contribute ideas, but the final performance depends on how effectively those ideas are organised and connected.
The experience helps teams practise creative collaboration, project management, communication, and collective delivery. It demonstrates that a bold idea becomes meaningful when people can bring it to life together.
BeatsWork uses rhythm to create a shared result. Participants learn different samba patterns before bringing them together in one collective performance.
Listening, timing, and adjustment become essential. The experience shows how individual interpretation and creative expression can contribute to a coordinated whole.
Using storytelling as a creative tool
Storytelling gives teams a practical way to shape and communicate ideas.
In Animate, participants plan and produce stop-motion films. Teams move from storyboarding and role allocation to filming and presentation, turning a business theme or creative prompt into an original visual story.
The process supports imagination, communication, project planning, and creative confidence.
HIT Factory uses music and video as the creative medium. Participants develop lyrics, compose a song, and produce a music video together.
Teams must combine different ideas while maintaining one recognisable concept. The activity gives people opportunities to contribute through writing, performance, production, organisation, and presentation.
Both experiences show that creativity becomes stronger when participants can translate an abstract message into something an audience can see, hear, and understand.
Experimenting with technology and new possibilities
Innovation also requires teams to explore unfamiliar tools and approaches.
In Robot Revolution, participants design, build, and programme collaborative robots. Teams coordinate technical, creative, and project responsibilities while testing their work and preparing for a final challenge.
The experience encourages experimentation, delegation, attention to detail, and practical problem-solving. Participants can see how rapid testing and different areas of expertise contribute to a stronger result.
Global Innovation Game places teams in an idea-generation and pitching challenge. Participants combine different prompts to develop new products, services, or tools, then communicate and validate their concepts under time pressure.
The experience develops lateral thinking, collaborative problem-solving, decision-making, influencing, and the ability to explain why an idea deserves support.
Choose the experience through the outcome
The strongest selection begins with what the team needs to practise.
Consider asking:
- Should participants create one shared result?
- Do we want to connect creativity with a company message?
- Should technology be part of the challenge?
- Do we want teams to practise pitching and influencing?
- Is the experience part of a conference or a development session?
- How much time is available?
- What should participants recognise about their behaviour afterwards?
The Big Picture or Bridging the Divide may suit teams that need to understand interdependence.
Dragon Squad and BeatsWork can support large-scale coordination and collective performance.
Animate and HIT Factory provide creative storytelling challenges.
Robot Revolution and Global Innovation Game give teams opportunities to experiment, solve problems, and communicate future-focused ideas.
The right choice depends on the outcome, audience, event format, and behaviours the organisation wants to strengthen.
Help the learning travel back to work
The experience creates a practice environment. Reflection connects it to the workplace.
A facilitated debrief can explore:
- How were ideas introduced and developed?
- Who helped other people contribute?
- How did the team respond when something needed to change?
- Which constraints improved the result?
- How were creative and practical priorities balanced?
- What should the team repeat in its everyday work?
These questions help participants connect their experience to current projects, planning conversations, and business priorities.
Innovation & Creativity is not only about producing more ideas. It is about helping people contribute, combine perspectives, test possibilities, and create something useful together.
When the experience is selected through the outcome and supported by thoughtful facilitation, creativity becomes a capability the team can continue practising.
Experiences that require teams to generate, develop, test, and present ideas can strengthen Innovation & Creativity. Examples include Dragon Squad, Animate, Robot Revolution, HIT Factory, Global Innovation Game, and The Big Picture.