“Creativity is one of the key factors that drive civilization forward.”

Beth Hennessey & Teresa Amabile

How can individuals, teams, and organizations create great business ideas (i.e., ideas for new products/services or businesses)? Business ideas drive organizational success and societal progress, especially in this era of exogenous shocks. Building ideas for new products/services or businesses is arguably one of the most fascinating activities in Management. Creative problem solving, the decision-making process aimed at producing novel and useful ideas, plays a central role in such endeavors.

The Creative Problem Solving: the business idea machine (CPS) program intends to develop, in an integrated, unique, step-by-step way, solid competencies in the use of creative problem solving for the formulation of new products/services or new businesses. The CPS program is unequivovally rigorous and practical. It is rigorous (i.e., science-based) as it is supported on the state-of-the-art theories, models, frameworks, and concepts produced by the best scientific research in multiple domains, such as creativity, management, cognitive science, and neuroscience.

 It is practical (i.e., action-oriented) as it focused on the specific issues that managers need to develop outstanding business ideas, and gives the Participants the opportunity to immediately apply the theoretical tools through the discussion of international, high-profile business cases specifically built for these classes and, week-by-week, by gradually building (in groups) an exciting idea/project for a new product/service or a new business. That is, the program enables an in-depth understanding of creative problem solving as a business idea machine, by gradually transforming emerging new facts into great business ideas.

The Director and instructor of the CPS program is himself a new project creation enthusiast. He launched dozens of highly successful executive education programs at Católica-Lisbon in recent decades, and was the founder of Católica-Lisbon’s Master of Science in Management and of the Executive Masters in Management. In 2023, he was included in the list of the world’s most influential scientists and has just published a revolutionary theory on how executives originate high-quality ideas when facing unprecedented shocks in the Academy of Management Review, the world’s top scientific publication in management theory.

Special features:

• Because managers act under the so-called bounded rationality conditions, one important feature of the program relies on its emphasis not only on what should be done in the creative problem solving process, but also on how it should be done (i.e., by considering in great detail the crucial cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes at work that determine the higher or lower quality of the outcome).
• Participants will form small groups that, using the concepts, theoretical perspectives, and models taught in our lectures, will gradually develop (week-by-week, step-by-step) their idea for a new product/service or new business. At the end of the program, those groups will make a formal presentation of their idea/project.