Boosting Creativity for Innovation

The HEC Boosting Creativity Specialization will close for enrollment on August 11, 2020. If you are interested in earning a Specialization Certificate, please upgrade or apply for Financial Aid in each course of the specialization by August 11, 2020, if you have not already done so. After August 11, 2020, learners will no longer have access to courses they have not paid for.

In order to earn a Specialization Certificate, you will need to complete all graded assignments, including peer reviews, by February 8, 2021. After that point, no new assignment submissions will be accepted for Certificate credit.

If you are enrolled in the degree or certificate version of this course, you will not be affected and can continue your studies beyond August 11, 2020.


Successful contemporary business relies on the ability of all its employees to be creative. Creativity can be developed and refined, albeit with effort and practice. The first goal of this course is to provide a variety of experiences and activities with the aim of developing the creative abilities of each participant. A second goal is to understand the importance of creativity from a consumer perspective. Consumers are being offered more and more opportunities to customize their products and services, and are increasingly seeking to express their creativity through their purchasing choices. As entrepreneurs, we have the ability to shape the consumer environment in ways that help consumers enhance their own creative abilities, and develop a unique relationship with them as a result.

This course is aimed at anyone who wants to understand what we actually know (as opposed to what we think we know) about human creativity, and how to use this knowledge to think differently and productively about business challenges. As the focus is on creativity as a cognitive function, it does not matter what your background is, what industry you come from or want to enter.

After completing this course, past students report having acquired a set of strategies that enable them to tackle business problems with a fresh perspective.

This course is part of the HEC Paris MSc in Innovation and Entrepreneurship. If you are admitted to the full program, your coursework will count towards your degree program

Module 1: Anatomy of creativity
-As we embark in your first creativity course, our first module focuses on understanding what creativity is, how others and you perceive it, and where those perceptions come from.

Module 2: The Importance of Positive Affect for Creativity
-The best of your creative potential brings together the best of your thinking, the best of your feeling and the best of your doing. Because it is often relatively ignored, this module focuses entirely on the importance of affect in creativity. Beyond intellectually understanding this importance, the module requires you to become an active observer of what affects you, versus what does not, in your daily life. It also teaches you how to harness these experiences to get a creative advantage.

Module 3: Shaping Your Creative Environment
-In module 2, we saw how you can work on your internal experience to enhance your creative potential. In module 3, we focus on how you can shape your external environment to constrain the creative process in a beneficial way.

Module 4: Introducing You to Step-by-Step Instructions
-In our last module, we dug deeper into the concept of an environmental variable that received considerable attention in creativity research, and also clearly applied to the business world: the external guidance that you get during the creative process. While many different types of guidance exist, module 4 introduces you to a few examples that have been documented to show remarkable traction in business.