The uncertainty project: managing uncertainty in innovation education

On MA Innovation Management at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, the importance of experimentation, learning from failure, dealing with risk and managing uncertainty coalesce in The Uncertainty Project. In the first three years of our existence, this project has run with live briefs coming from a number of commercial and public sector organisations and—during Spring 2011—in collaboration with UK Sport, the University of Ghana (Accra) and the University of Development Studies (Tamale). It is important that the students engage in creative risk-taking and experimentation in ways which are not only valuable in and of themselves, but which are able to be synthesised into meaningful, contextually appropriate and culturally, socially or economically relevant outcomes. The up-coming collaboration is particularly interesting. While—at the time of writing—this project has yet to be finished, the significance of cross-cultural collaborations and the spanning of different disciplines (including Business, Humanities, Social Sciences, Cultural/Creative Industries, Development Studies, Sport, Engineering and Sciences) is already noticable. This presentation seeks to show our experience of running The Uncertainty Project using these examples and to highlight successes, failures and responses to these failures, with the aim of showing that innovation in an educational context (as in any other), risk-taking and failure can be managed to achieve successful creative outcomes.