UKZN Hosts Creative Problem-Solving Workshop for Student Entrepreneurs

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The University of KwaZulu-Natal’s (UKZN) Student Entrepreneurship portfolio hosted a two-day creative problem-solving workshop for students currently involved in entrepreneurship or aspiring to start their own businesses.

Themed ‘Ignite Your Creativity’, the workshop was facilitated by US-based Ohio University Professor Nicole Antoinette Smith, a social entrepreneur who grew up in generational poverty and later founded eleV8T, a workforce development programme aimed at empowering individuals to reach their full potential.

Smith said the workshop was curated to explore different approaches to solving problems using a variety of creative problem-solving techniques. An educator by profession, she added that she aims to reimagine education by igniting innovation among future entrepreneurs.

Students were divided into groups based on their business interests, including categories such as agriculture, manufacturing, services and retail. During the interactive session, they received a creative problem-solving toolkit - comprising an eleV8T tool card, sticky notes, a marker, poster board and a sandglass timer - to guide them through each task.

The first task was to define challenges within their business category and explore ways to address them.

Smith introduced the students to the two key thinking stages of problem-solving and highlighted their importance in fuelling creativity and attaining progress. She said divergent thinking was the imaginative phase that called on individuals to generate as many ideas as possible, exploring options and expanding possibilities, while convergent thinking was the selective phase, where individuals sorted, prioritised and refined their ideas, narrowing their focus on a solution. 

To inspire divergent thinking, Smith encouraged the students to ask creative questions like ‘How to’, ‘How might’, ‘In what ways’, and ‘What might be’, to stimulate the creative process.

Working in their groups, students selected a key challenge and applied a structured problem-solving approach that follows four pivotal steps: clarifying the problem, generating ideas, developing solutions, and implementing and testing.

Smith defined clarifying the problem “as grasping the reality of the situation, gathering all the information required, identifying gaps, problems and issues, and focusing on the right problem.”

She urged students to overcome their fear in order to create, and to use both divergent and convergent thinking methods, along with generative artificial intelligence, to develop ideas. 

Remarking on the benefits of creative problem solving, Smith said it allowed entrepreneurs to make decisions faster, be more innovative, have team engagement and be resilient.

Students remarked that the workshop helped reignite their creativity when addressing entrepreneurial challenges.

Words: Hlengiwe Khwela

Photographs: Sethu Dlamini