The Center
We are a center of excellence that combines research in design, studies on creativity and co-design dynamics to offer organizations tools and methods capable of fostering and activating the creative approach that facilitates innovation processes through design.
In our work we are guided by the scientific study of creativity combined with the strategic mindset of design thinking. We build new strategic scenarios together by integrating Design Thinking and Creative Thinking.
Our projects have people at the center, we generate new ideas with them and explore concepts capable of bringing value to the company, training, research and teaching.
In particular, there are 3 thematic areas on which our research and project work is focused:
Our world calls for sustainable change and the future is what we look at to make it real. By building tools and methodologies we make people empowered by future thinking approaches to facilitate decision-making. We use these tools with students and companies to build a new mindset that can bring innovation in our present.
We develop, implement and apply a human-centered design model with creativity-driven tools and methods that allow us to facilitate and strategically guide the ongoing digital evolution process by exploiting the potential of new technologies to reach Digital Maturity through the enhancement of people and creativity factors. We study how new emerging technologies influence creativity and vice versa how digital tools can facilitate and increase it. This allows us to anticipate future visions and generate scenarios above all related to digital changes, but also to social and economic sustainability.
We design methods and tools to enhance the factors of creativity and cognitive enhancement aspects of the design process of designers, we facilitate the acquisition of soft knowledge through learning by doing and peer learning, we guide the transfer of an approach and a design and creative mindset to non-designers and professionals in different sectors.
We carry out projects and research relating to the psycho-physical well-being of the person in the medical-biological field, supporting these activities with creativity and co-design tools. This allows us to develop solutions whose effectiveness is truly perceived by human, considering the body and mind as design places, using cutting-edge interactive materials and technologies. We design innovative solutions for wearable devices, bio-robotic systems, devices for rehabilitation, and systems for the pro-active lifestyle, creating a new unity between human and device.
IDEActivity’s Manifesto
Creativity
is the generation of new ideas, either new ways of looking at existing problems, or of seeing new opportunities, by exploiting emerging technologies or changes in markets.
It is not an innate ability and like all other faculties, it can be stimulated, expanded and channeled on specific topics. All people can be creative, so creativity can be developed using techniques that stimulate these skills. Knowledge and information are the foundations of creativity. Scientific research has been oriented towards the development of creativity as an educational process in any field.
Design
is what connects creativity and innovation. The design gives shape to ideas so that they become practical and attractive proposals for users.
New design methods must be based on human-product experiential aspects, including cognition and emotionality as well as physicality. Starting from these premises, it is possible to talk about an evolved concept of design that becomes strategic for companies, institutions and organizations, giving the opportunity to generate innovation, consolidating a human-centered approach to innovation that is unique to design. Design therefore assumes the connotation of a “planning mentality” as a strategic approach to solving concrete problems in which creativity plays a fundamental role.
Innovation
is the (successful) exploitation of new ideas, the process that leads them to become new products, new services, new management models or even new ways of doing business.
Creativity as a mental phenomenon always precedes innovation as an economic, social and cultural phenomenon, generating ideas that, communicated and adopted by the community, develop innovation. There is no innovation without creative ideas: indeed, creativity is the basis of innovation, they are complementary activities: it can be said that creativity is not only the source of innovation processes, nor a sort of input for innovation, but it is the environment where innovative processes can develop more easily. Creativity is the context, the reference framework, where innovation can develop, a sort of humus and fertile soil, to be cultivated and spread across the board.
Our team
It is characterized by a strong heterogeneity in terms of professional and personal skills.
Collaborators
University professors and researchers are involved, according to needs, by selected and specialized profiles from other sectors, experts in the world of business and creativity. This is because IDEActivity Center has its roots in the richness of multidisciplinarity, understood as convergence on the same field of specialists and scholars from different sectors, with their different approaches and points of view.
Network
IDEActivity is an associate member of two international creativity networks:
Webster Center for Creativity and Innovation (WCCI)
Possibility Studies Network (PSN)
Furthermore, IDEActivity Center enjoys a vast network of contacts which are the result of collaborations activated on multiple research projects both in Europe and in consultancy.
