Hot potatoes and double diamond in a whiz: can techniques and processes really lead to innovation?

The paper introduces a brief student project that was carried out with a large number of groups of students from engineering and design backgrounds. This was intended to provide the students with an experience of developing innovative ideas from the pre-idea position to the stage of putting forward concrete proposals for action. The paper relays the experience of running such a project and its benefits, but then asks the questions of how close it came to achieving its goal of getting students involved in an innovation process. Innovation would seem to require three conditions for it to exist. The first is a significantly different idea: the second is an environment that nurtures the idea and the third is the society that is prepared to take up and disseminate the embodied idea. The small six-week project aims to provide some techniques that make the achievement of these criteria more likely. It resulted in changed behaviour from some students but for significant innovation to take place a longer period needs to be used to develop and nurture it.