101 Activities for Teaching Creativity and Problem Solving.Copyright © 2005 by John Wiley &
Sons, Inc. Reproduced by permission of Pfeiffer, an Imprint of Wiley. http://www.pfeiffer.com
Savage capitalized on his strengths and borrowed a concept from someone else.
Once he had copied the basic idea, he turned the concept into a creative product
suited for his business. Savage was a Copy Cat.
- Have each group think of a story or event similar to their problem, describe it in
detail, and use the descriptions as potential stimuli to copy for resolving the
- Tell them to write down any ideas on Post-it®Notes (one idea per note) and place
them on flip charts for evaluation.
Ask the groups to discuss the following types of questions:
- How easy was it to think of similar ideas?
- How did the similarity of another idea affect your ability to apply it to your chal-
lenge? Were more similar ideas easier or more difficult to apply?
- To what extent did your knowledge of other ideas affect your ability to apply the
- Would this technique work better with only certain types of problems? If so, what
Also consider having participants debrief using the following questions:
- What was most helpful about this exercise?
- What was most challenging?
- What can we apply?
- How would you rate the value of this exercise to helping us with this issue?
- Will this exercise be helpful in the future for other sessions?
- What did you learn?
- What will we be able to use from this exercise?
- What ideas were generated, and which ones were most interesting?
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