Grant program: Mentoring Initiative Projects - Pilot

Grant recipient: Leyland Pitt, Beedie School of Business

Project team: Sarah Lord Ferguson, research assistant, Joey Lam, research assistant

Timeframe: March 2020 to October 2020

Funding: $5,000

Courses addressed: 

• BUS 702 – Marketing Management (MBA)
• BUS 615 – Marketing Management (EMBA)
  

Final report: View Leyland Pitt's Final Report (PDF) >>

Description: The purpose of this project is to explore the use of LEGO® Serious Play (LSP) in the MBA marketing classroom as a way to enhance creativity, student engagement, and teamwork. LSP is a facilitation technique that guides participants through directed exercises using Lego blocks to build structures that symbolically represent abstract concepts, values and experiences. The core steps of the LSP (everyone shares, everyone builds, everyone speaks) encourages active participation by everyone and ensures a collective solution through an open sharing of ideas. Participants are told that the purpose of the activity is not to build the most attractive or aesthetically pleasing structure, but that the build is a physical expression of what the builder envisions as the solution to the posed challenge. The overall aim of the project would be to determine whether LSP would be a valuable learning activity for future MBA classes. As such, we will also record instructor and TA reflections on the success of the activity and adapt our LSP protocol to aid other marketing instructors who wish to use the activity in the future.

Questions addressed: 

• What is the student experience of the Lego Serious Play activity?
• How does the Lego Serious Play activity increase student creativity?
• How does the Lego Serious Play increase in-class engagement?
• How does the Lego Serious Play increase teamwork?
• What is the instructor (and RA) experience of delivering the Lego Serious Play game?
• What do students produce with the Lego?

Knowledge sharing: Findings will be shared with colleagues at a small informal seminar led by the research assistant. We plan to submit the results of the study to either a marketing education conference or to an education track at a marketing conference, i.e. the Academy of Marketing Science annual conference in the next year.

Keywords: Creativity, Lego Serious Play, Storytelling, Innovation