Zero to One

Teaching Gitwit’s creative methodology and mindset to business students

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The Opportunity

How does someone “learn” innovation? And how should schools teach it?

Experts with the World Economic Forum say four of the top five skills needed to thrive in the next decade are directly related to creativity and innovation. But most business schools — schools in general, really — are built to create more knowledge workers, not creators and innovators.

When the University of Tulsa’s Collins College of Business approached Gitwit to help drive enrollment, we knew the answer was more than just a marketing campaign. We had to create a radically different type of course and curriculum — one that would be completely new and out-of-the-box for higher education.

Gitwit proposed designing a new course called “Zero to One: How to Innovate and Change Your World” to attract current students to the Collins College of Business and recruit prospective students to the University of Tulsa.

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Course Plan

We threw out the typical college course playbook when we developed Zero to One - lectures were replaced with workshops; reading assignments were replaced by field research; papers were replaced by presentations to industry professionals. The result was more experience than course, leaving students with real, transferable skills and a deeper desire to learn more.

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Brand + Marketing

Knowing the University of Tulsa’s Collins College of Business needed a way to differentiate itself in the competitive business school landscape, we created an interactive website that both told the story of the Zero to One class and positioned the school as a bold, go-against-the-grain institution with its dynamic branding.

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Drive enrollment — and excitement

To drive enrollment, we created a series of digital ads that targeted students on-campus and prospective students across the region.

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Curriculum Creation + Delivery

On the curriculum front, we developed the entire course by shaping Gitwit’s approach to innovation and creativity into a methodology teachable within a 14-week semester. Gitwit’s Head of Learning Amanda Turk collaborated with University of Tulsa Prof. Nathan Woolard to teach the course, hosting Nitwits as expert guest instructors and mentors.The class is now a required course for first-year Entrepreneurship students at the University of Tulsa, though students of all class years and degree programs take it. In Zero to One, students learn and test a full range of creativity and innovation methodologies. Starting at “zero,” students learn how to explore and identify a problem worth solving, and then take it to “one,” by developing a viable solution through cycles of ideation, prototyping and user feedback. The course culminates with a live pitch of the compelling problems they discover and the solutions they built to solve those problems to a panel of experienced innovators and entrepreneurs.

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Video

Our team captured the story of Zero to One’s successful first semester in a recruitment video, giving the Collins College of Business team a tool to pitch the course to students.