“What Would You Do with $5 and Two Hours?” — a Lesson in Creativity

That was the question Tina Seelig put to her students. (She is the author of the book, and also a professor at Stanford University; her work centres on neuroscience, management science and engineering, and innovation in business.)

The $5-and-two-hours challenge at Stanford was set for a class of students on a business course. They were divided into teams and given $5 each, with the aim of making as much money as they could in two hours, and then giving a three-minute presentation about how they had done it.

There were a great many interesting ideas: buying a ticket to Las Vegas and trying their luck, pumping up bicycle tyres on campus, selling restaurant reservations near the university, taking donations…

And among them, the highest-earning team made only a little under $300.

And the one team that made $650 defeated every assumption and every act of imagination that Tina, and everyone else, had brought to it.

The winning team realised that $5 and two hours were not the most valuable assets they had.

What they had instead, they decided, was this: their own brains, and their three minutes of presentation time in front of a Stanford class full of high achievers. That was the most valuable resource.

They decided to sell their three-minute slot to a company that wanted to recruit Stanford students, and that company brought them $650.

WOW!

The most important lessons I take from it:

1. The far end of creativity is making use of what you already OWN.
2. A constraint is an opportunity. And do not let your constraints kill off your ability to create.

Writing this today, I hope you will bear with the limits of what I know.