Imagine a business school where you don't graduate by writing a thesis. Instead, you graduate by launching a real venture and getting it funded. That was the bold idea behind the Helsinki School of Creative Entrepreneurship (HSCE), launched in January 2007 by the three Helsinki universities that later merged to form Aalto University. Its director, Dr. Peter Kelly, wanted his first students to think like creative entrepreneurs from day one. The question was who would power them up.

Peter had met Dr. D in June 2006 at Stanford's Roundtable on Entrepreneurship Education (REE) in Bangkok, where Dr. D ran one of the sessions. Impressed, he invited Thinkergy to kick off the new school with its very first session. So in January 2007, Dr. D flew from tropical Bangkok to wintry Helsinki, where daylight lasted only from about nine to three, to run a three-day Thinkergy Creativity Bootcamp for about 20 participants. They walked into a room with no tables or chairs, walls covered in visual stimuli, music playing and props everywhere. Not a typical classroom!

On the first two days, the participants rediscovered their creative selves, explored how to build Creativity Ltd., and learned the Thinkergy Creative Process, the forerunner of X-IDEA. A team game, In the Year 2100, stretched their imaginations far into the future. Then came the highlight: Creativity in Action, our Instant Innovation Team Challenge on a real-life case: How might we create better in-flight experiences for economy class passengers on long-haul flights? Two teams of about ten moved through five modules: the Kick-Off, the Idea Circuit, the Idea Studio, the Juror's Chamber and finally the Idea Market, where they pitched their top concepts. From the start, the work had a real audience in mind: Finnair, Finland's flag carrier. In the Idea Circuit, each team set out to outdo the other, and together they produced roughly 2,500 raw ideas.

Next came a step that a few months later would become a signature of X-IDEA: discovery. Before developing anything, the teams sorted their raw ideas into normal, interesting and wild ones. Some were wonderfully wild, like hiring stand-up comedians as flight attendants, or flying straight through storm fronts to turn the flight into a roller-coaster ride. Among the interesting ones was a gem: theme zones within economy class that passengers could book in advance, with a dark Sleep zone, a Work zone, an Entertainment zone and a Party zone. The teams developed about 60 Idea Concepts and pitched their best ten at the Idea Market. To this day, Dr. D uses their field of ideas as a teaching exercise to show how to tell interesting ideas from wild and normal ones.

"The Thinkergy Creativity Bootcamp has stayed on my mind for several days, which proves that your intense and audio-visual teaching method works perfectly," said participant Martti Mikkola of the Foundation for Finnish Inventions. "The third day exercises showed that the theory operates well in practice." Peter Kelly later took the top ten concepts to an innovation lead at Finnair, and they opened the door for HSCE to work with the airline. The participants had squeezed into economy class, but their ideas flew first class, all the way to Finnair.

Like its students' ideas, HSCE itself was ahead of its time, probably by two decades. After about two years, the experiment ended as its parent universities merged into Aalto University. Today, venture-based learning is spreading at universities around the world.

Do you want your students or your people to think like creative entrepreneurs, not just learn about entrepreneurship? Contact us to find out how a Thinkergy Creativity Bootcamp may help them rediscover their creative selves and apply X-IDEA to a real challenge in just three days.