Sadly this is my third and FINAL entry to my innovation blog. The semester is coming to a close as well as my school career! Well for NOW anyways! I think we all can agree that education is never truly done, it is very important to further your education every chance you get, this will only in turn help you further your career, it will never harm you in any way! It may take up a lot of your time but it will never harm your career! I am set to get my degree the end of this semester and I must say it feels great, it feels like such an accomplishment and I know will pay off! I've already seen the effects of it, I recently was offered the Store Manager position at my place of work, (when I say recently I mean about 1.5 months ago)! I can only assume that they offered me this position based off my hard work, as well as my educational background, drive, and desire that I bring to the table!
I am sad to see this class end, I must admit when I first say this class as a requirement I kind of laughed at the title, I never really understood why they would have such a class created at all let alone make it a required course. I am actually kind of embarrassed at the way I envisioned the class, now after taking it I can honestly say that my outlook has changed 100000000%. I can see why it is a required class and that it should be, it brought a lot of different things to light for me and showed me how important it is to think differently! Thinking outside of the box brings so much to the table for my company and helps me keep an edge over my competitors! It truly is a great business class and I am sorry that I ever doubted or misjudged it! I truly am very thankful for having the chance to take this course and having such a great teacher that pushed us out of our comfort zone as well as pushed our creativity to the limit!
It is my goal to constantly bring something new to the table every month, even every day if possible! I am going to push myself to challenge my creativity and think outside the box. I will expect my employees to help me with this so we can bounce ideas off of each other! I feel visiting and secret shopping the competition at least weekly will help for us to stay on top of our game as well as instill different ideas and ways of twisting advertisements to target customers and draw in more business.
I think I still have a lot of work and growth that can be made when it comes to my creativity and innovation but I do feel that I have made a lot of headway in this area! I would grade myself on a scale of 1-10 a 8 for creativity and a 7 for innovation! I was able to push through my barriers by teaching myself to just let go! Understanding that there is no stupid idea and it is okay to "fail," every idea is a great idea and sometimes it just needs to be molded and tweaked and collaboration can definitely help there! I had to also take myself out of the equation and think from a customers perspective rather than from a manager and employee perspective, this helped tremendously!
My store is located inside of Bay Park Square Mall, and it is a Sprint location. As I've shared throughout this course there is much competition inside of this mall. For example: there is Cellcom, US Cellular, AT&T, Verizon so that is 4 so far, BUT then there is Radio Shack who sells AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, then there is Best Buy Mobile who sells AT&T, Verizon and Sprint, and then directly across the street there is another Sprint store, so as you can see there is 10 different stores besides ours that sells cellphones services, and then there is 3 other just SPRINT stores within 1 mile of us, that creates quite the competitive environment!
One thing that I did come up with that was innovative for work, well that I believed was innovative. I came up with a way of streaming a slideshow on a constant loop to advertise sprint and offer some type of pop advertisement that would grab peoples eyes, our location had a disadvantage, it was brand new and no one knew that we were inside the mall, some people still don't know unless they have heard by word of mouth or just shopping inside the mall. So I thought throwing up a digital picture frame and then having a slideshow of our promotions and services streaming across it would be a great idea! It then progressed to having a 17in monitor displayed hooked up to a laptop which would offer more convenience to change or add any promotions that we'd like to the slideshow! It has really worked out great!
And so this sadly ends my blog entry and journal :-( Thank you for reading and thank you for pushing me mentally and creatively!
Shannon Demeny
Monday, April 30, 2012
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Entry 2
Creativity...hmn where to begin when discussing creativity let alone my creativity specifically. I honestly think that I lack in the creative department I have tendency to be stuck in my own little box and can't seem to break through those walls. But lets take a look at some of the creative things I've done lately. My Great Dane Kia is very very sick she's been at the vet the past 3 days and they still are not sure what is wrong with her, I have to bring her in every morning at 7:00 AM and I pick her up every night around 5:30 PM this has been going on since Monday the 19th, but she has not been eating for about 5 days now, at least not that any of us have witnessed and Lord knows we have tried to get her to eat and drink anything and everything. That is the main reason for the lateness on my blog as well as my assignments. But lets discuss some creative approaches, I've added blue gatorade to her water to try to add some flavor as well as hydrate her, tried to provide her with beef and rice, chicken and rice, Cheetos, bacon bits inside of her rice and food. I've tried even tuna just because it's stinky, I've tried cottage cheese and cheese in general nothing has been working and that is the extend of my creativity lately. I've been to worried and scared to do anything but focus on her and my son, I'm just not ready to try and explain to my 3 year old little boy what death is, and if Kia dies why his best friend is gone, he already has to deal with not having a daddy I'm not prepared to explain why he may lose his best friend.
Innovation is always happening at work, I work with electronics and in the wireless field to be exact, so innovations is constantly surrounding me there are changes always being made some good some not so good. The most exciting thing happening right now to me is LTE coming to the Green Bay area, LTE is another form of 4G a faster internet speed being offered through wireless carriers, its a completely different frequency than ever before at least in this area I should say, and its quite exciting!!! I can't reveal too much about it, but it will definitely be benefiting us!
Innovation is always happening at work, I work with electronics and in the wireless field to be exact, so innovations is constantly surrounding me there are changes always being made some good some not so good. The most exciting thing happening right now to me is LTE coming to the Green Bay area, LTE is another form of 4G a faster internet speed being offered through wireless carriers, its a completely different frequency than ever before at least in this area I should say, and its quite exciting!!! I can't reveal too much about it, but it will definitely be benefiting us!
Sunday, February 12, 2012
Entry 1
So let me get a few things off my chest...
I feel like my creativity level and innovation skills are severely lacking! :-( I am not as creative as I used to be! I used to write poetry, draw random pictures (tattoos) just sketch out new advertisement ideas, new products that I dreamed about. I don't even know the last time I've done that! I don't know if it's because I just feel like I have no time or that it's not going to go anywhere! If I had to grade my skills on a 1-10 basis I would probably give myself a 6 for creativity and maybe a 4/5 for innovation.
I am going to say this though...I put 70% of the BLAME on society and our education system. Well the education system that I was forced into as a child (it's going to be my 5 year ruin so I can officially not be considered a kid anymore! :-D). Anyways back to our serious discussion; society and education is going to take a brunt of my hostility! Throughout schooling I felt that teachers stunted my creativity growth, I felt as if things always had to be their way or the highway. They put too much pressure on everyone to be the same and "fit in," that leaves our creativity and innovation skills to never develop :-(. I personally feel that I have a fear of rejection and being told that "you're wrong," or "that's stupid." I remember when I was in high school I told one of my friends that they should make heated steering wheels, my friend said "that's stupid, the only people that would want heated steering wheels are people who live in the arctic, like us!" Well 4 years later my mom purchases a new Cadillac, and what does it have? Heated steering wheel, I was so upset (I'm sure that there were patents in the works already) but I had doubted myself for fear of what people would think. I do believe that I am getting better though, I only share my ideas with people close to me that I feel won't judge me and will support me instead, but I am not completely open to my creativeness nor do I tap into it as much as I could or should.
I work in the technology industry (Cellphones) so innovation is always swarming around me! For example the virtual keyboard (rumored to be coming out on the iphone5) that displays from phones on a flat surface to allow for better text messaging and or composition of emails, or documents etc. Also a lot of applications or phones are beginning to over augmented reality, have you heard of augmented reality? It's quite amazing! Go ahead and GOOGLE it! But let me give you a quick run down, a lot of us have issues with our cellphones being glued to our hands, we like to text while we walk, and lets be honest how many of us just stare at our phones and text while we walk? Well there is augmented reality apps that allow us to use our camera feature and see where we are walking as we text. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, "really?! do we need such things? has society come as far as not being able to just put our phone down in order to walk to our cars?!" But look it up there a lot of other cool things that augmented reality can offer us outside of on our mobile devices! :-) I do think the virtual keyboard would be quite COOL! YES I said COOL!
I feel like my creativity level and innovation skills are severely lacking! :-( I am not as creative as I used to be! I used to write poetry, draw random pictures (tattoos) just sketch out new advertisement ideas, new products that I dreamed about. I don't even know the last time I've done that! I don't know if it's because I just feel like I have no time or that it's not going to go anywhere! If I had to grade my skills on a 1-10 basis I would probably give myself a 6 for creativity and maybe a 4/5 for innovation.
I am going to say this though...I put 70% of the BLAME on society and our education system. Well the education system that I was forced into as a child (it's going to be my 5 year ruin so I can officially not be considered a kid anymore! :-D). Anyways back to our serious discussion; society and education is going to take a brunt of my hostility! Throughout schooling I felt that teachers stunted my creativity growth, I felt as if things always had to be their way or the highway. They put too much pressure on everyone to be the same and "fit in," that leaves our creativity and innovation skills to never develop :-(. I personally feel that I have a fear of rejection and being told that "you're wrong," or "that's stupid." I remember when I was in high school I told one of my friends that they should make heated steering wheels, my friend said "that's stupid, the only people that would want heated steering wheels are people who live in the arctic, like us!" Well 4 years later my mom purchases a new Cadillac, and what does it have? Heated steering wheel, I was so upset (I'm sure that there were patents in the works already) but I had doubted myself for fear of what people would think. I do believe that I am getting better though, I only share my ideas with people close to me that I feel won't judge me and will support me instead, but I am not completely open to my creativeness nor do I tap into it as much as I could or should.
I work in the technology industry (Cellphones) so innovation is always swarming around me! For example the virtual keyboard (rumored to be coming out on the iphone5) that displays from phones on a flat surface to allow for better text messaging and or composition of emails, or documents etc. Also a lot of applications or phones are beginning to over augmented reality, have you heard of augmented reality? It's quite amazing! Go ahead and GOOGLE it! But let me give you a quick run down, a lot of us have issues with our cellphones being glued to our hands, we like to text while we walk, and lets be honest how many of us just stare at our phones and text while we walk? Well there is augmented reality apps that allow us to use our camera feature and see where we are walking as we text. I'm sure a lot of you are thinking, "really?! do we need such things? has society come as far as not being able to just put our phone down in order to walk to our cars?!" But look it up there a lot of other cool things that augmented reality can offer us outside of on our mobile devices! :-) I do think the virtual keyboard would be quite COOL! YES I said COOL!
I like to think that after this course I will raise my grade to at least an 8, although I think I may always lack in the innovation department because I have tendency to think inside a very restricted box. I still am a little hazy on what innovation actually is and means, from assignment to assignment my way of looking at innovation changes, sometimes drastically but sometimes just a little tweaks here and there. I hope by the end of this course I will have a better understanding of creativity and innovation and how to tap into it as well as rid myself of mind/creativity blocks!
Thanks for reading :-) I'll be back soon!!
Shannon Demeny
INTRO :-)
Okay,
So this is going to be my first entry on a blog EVER! I never thought of creating my own blog because quite honestly my life is really NOT that interesting! Plus I've never been very HTML savvy to begin with! I'm on track to graduate from NWTC this coming May (2012) and I am currently enrolled in this Innovation in the Workplace Course. It challenges me on a daily basis to push myself into creativity! I feel like I've lacked creativity in the past few years, BUT I am on the verge of getting it back...hopefully! This is going to be step 1! Let's get it started! :-)
So this is going to be my first entry on a blog EVER! I never thought of creating my own blog because quite honestly my life is really NOT that interesting! Plus I've never been very HTML savvy to begin with! I'm on track to graduate from NWTC this coming May (2012) and I am currently enrolled in this Innovation in the Workplace Course. It challenges me on a daily basis to push myself into creativity! I feel like I've lacked creativity in the past few years, BUT I am on the verge of getting it back...hopefully! This is going to be step 1! Let's get it started! :-)
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