In this talk, Tina Seelig, a professor at Stanford’s d.school and venture capital partner at STVP, explains her approach to teaching creativity and innovation. She centers the class around the mantra “any problem is an opportunity; the bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity,” a belief shared across the venture‑capital and entrepreneurial communities. Seelig illustrates the point with a short video clip from venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, who emphasizes that without a big problem there is no big opportunity. Her pedagogy involves giving students a series of problems that start small and grow progressively larger over the quarter, helping them become comfortable tackling increasingly complex challenges. Rather than a traditional lecture or multiple‑choice test, she uses experiential, risk‑taking activities that push students out of their comfort zones—“jumping off cliffs” and feeling solutions in the gut—to foster genuine creative thinking. The classroom is presented as an innovation lab where conventional seating and passive learning are replaced by active, collaborative problem‑solving.
Chapters
As part of my role at stvp, I have the incredible honor of teaching a course on creativity and innovation. In fact, I see some of my students in the room and the entire overarching theme of this class is that all problems are opportunities. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. In fact, anyone in my class would probably be able to recite that in their sleep, right? Any problem is an opportunity. The bigger the problem, the bigger the opportunity. And what I do is I give students problems. They start out as really small problems and over the course of the quarter, they get bigger and bigger and bigger until finally they just get extremely comfortable taking on challenges and looking at them through the lens of possibilities. Now don't just listen to me. I mean, why should you listen to me telling you that problems are opportunities? This is something that is embraced by the entire venture capital community and the whole entrepreneurial community. In fact, I'm going to play you a video clip that I play all the time. It's one of my favorites. It's by Vinod Khosla. Do you guys know who Vinod Khosla is? Who is he? Founder of Sun Microsystems, successful venture capitalist, and this is a 27 second long clip where he talks about problems as opportunities.
One thing I would say is find a big. To me, any big problem is a big opportunity. Because if you think about it, no problem, no solution, no company. It's very simple. Every big problem is a big opportunity. If you don't have a big problem, you don't have a big opportunity. Nobody will pay you to solve a non problem.
In fact, I see that was a talk where Tom Byers, my colleague, was introducing him, interviewing him. And it's a clip that we play in all of our classes because this is the essence, the core of entrepreneurship. So how do you teach this? How do you teach people to turn problems and opportunities and look at the world as opportunity rich? And is it like this? Is this what you do? You line people up in rows and columns, right? In fact, it kind of looks like this room right here. Everyone lined up in rows and columns, the chairs bolted to the floor. God forbid you actually talk to anyone else or move around. Looks like everyone's taking a multiple choice test where they're filling out one right answer to every question, filling it out with a number two pencil. Is that how you teach creativity? I don't think so. This is the way you teach creativity. You get people out of their comfort zone, you get them jumping off of perfectly good cliffs, you get them to feel it in their gut. It's not necessarily a completely intellectual experience. You need to be able to take risks to do things you haven't done before, to take on problems that no one knows the answer to.
