Abstract:

The number of the courses and workshops in the best universities has increased since 2010, which have been officially supported by the private companies. Since then, the technology transfer offices have become more active to support creativity and innovation as their main innovation activity by giving initiatives of opening new creative thinking-oriented workshops. All these changes, regarding particularly on creative thinking-oriented workshops have changed the roles of the technology transfer offices in developing innovative products and services, particularly those technological ones. All these new trends have strategically changed in order to cope with the changes in the technology-based economies, which become benefits for the different parts, like benefits for the industry, benefits for the university, and benefits for the individuals.

As Anderson (2013) points out,‘design thinking has been described as the best way to be creative and innovate, while within the design realm, design thinking may be partly ignored and taken for granted, despite a long history of academic development and debate’ (p.1).Furthermore, creativity oriented trainings are the most important long-term strategies and missions of the organization, particularly those of technology transfer offices which develop strong partnerships between the university and the industry in producing technology based innovation.

This study aims to analyze how the role of the creative thinking-oriented workshops, like design thinking training have affected the development of the to develop an innovative technology based products and services in the changing environment of the technology transfer office in Turkey, like in Stanford University. The participants were selected from one of the university technology transfer office. By using phenomenological analysis, the workshops had been observed for six week and 12 different research questions were answered in the semi-structured interviews.The collected data were analyzed in Atlas.ti 7 n order to make depth study. Most (98%) agreed that the creative thinking-oriented trainings were strongly needed to promote and empower the creativity in the university environment. The participants had mentioned that the strategy and mission of the universities were not enough to meet the needs of today’s changes in the development of the technology based innovative products and services. Even though all the universities try to maximize innovation by improving their involvement in the technology based innovative products for the economic benefits, most of them are not so capable in technological improvements. Additionally, the large number of the participants (88%) agreed that the awareness particularly of the academics was not enough to increase creativity, so they needed short and intensive workshops and training courses, like in the other countries, especially in the US. More importantly, the technology transfer offices play important and crucial roles in empowering different strategies in the development of the innovative products and services. As most (83%) of the participants pointed out that creative thinking-oriented courses were not well developed in Turkey.More importantly,they had limited implications in the development of the innovative products. They strongly persuaded that awareness should have been increased in the training of the creativity at the universities where the technology transfer offices were the changing agents.

Keywords:

Creative Thinking-Oriented Trainings, Workshops, Design Thinking, Technology Transfer Offices, Innovative Technology Based Products and Services.