Innovation camp

The 1st day:
We were totally excited by the new and beautiful place with our friendly fellows. A promising unforgettable trip!

Everything went well in the first day since we could quickly get into our task with loads of ideas were created immediately.
Some explanation about the tool we used for brainstorming: we sat in a circle of three people, each member thought about a crazy idea that is impossible to happen and wrote down to the note. After that, the notes would be given to the next one and that person would make those ideas more reasonable. The notes were again sent to the next one in the circle. This time, the ideas would be adjusted to be real. Finally, we read out loud all the ideas and discussed about them.
By repeating the process, we came up with quite many things.
We all felt good!

The 2nd day:
It can be called an eventful day since we went through quite many different states. The morning started quite nice with the echo of an effective day yesterday. After having a quick meeting with the couches and the other groups, we continued with our work. A lot of papers and notes were spread over the table.



With the idea of making different scenarios for our task, we almost had the 1st one completed by noon and planed to make the 2nd one in the afternoon. We were grateful to have the help from the couches. Open sharing made the atmosphere comfortable.
We have a good lunch and good walk together around the area after that. The weather was nice with sunshine and the view right next to the sea was beautiful!
In the afternoon, work was continued. However, the situation changed a bit when we had another advise from the couches which directed to a different direction. We got confused. And tired. Our spirit was down. However, we tried to work with the 2nd scenario as the solution for the issue.

Late in the afternoon, a new task of picking one thing from the hill that can present for what we were doing was given. Our answer for the task was the picture taken from the watch-tower on the top of the hill.


There were two messages that we wanted to show: first, it was about the grocery company that we were working on. It might be on top of the industry at the moment, however there will always be the risk of someone building the higher "tower" to surpass this peak. Second, the "thing" required to take from the task can be touchable entity, but it can also be whatever like a picture.

We turned back to the main task in the evening with the idea of having all the papers done. We were ready to close the task and hoped it will be not too late. However, the fact were completely different. We had a quite strained argument with the couches in the last minutes about what we have done. It ended up with the unexpected effort to work more on our task. We stayed late till 1 am and felt both tired and disappointed.

The last day:
We did not have so much time since we needed to clean up the place before leaving by noon. Our three people quickly wrapped up the task with some small discussion about how much was done and what was improved from the previous night. Although not everything went well as we were expected, we know that we did try hard and we learned from both good and not good experience.

What we learned:
- "Sounds easy" task can be big challenge for being radically innovative and having breakthrough ideas
- Motivation is very important for a good performance.
- Failure accepted attitude is necessary for an innovator (The disagreement between our group and the couches can be seen as a failure and we need to overcome that "pain" for having better work).