The Essence of Improvisation: Promoting Emotional Fitness in Employees, Products, and Customer Experiences

My proposal directly builds on my Ph.D. work, which has concerned how musical and theatre improvisation can be applied in business and public health settings to promote cognitive and social-cognitive goals. In particular, Lululemon is interested in harnessing the cognitive principles underlying improvisation in order to promote emotional fitness in two complimentary ways––at a human resource level through targeted, research-informed training sessions with Lululemon employees, and at a customer level by the creation of new products and/or in-store experiences that embody the concept of ‘holistic fitness’. The goal of my proposal is to facilitate these aims for Lululemon by developing a line of basic cognitive neuroscience research at UBC that seeks to distill down the cause-and-effect impacts of improvisation training so that they can be more directly applied to meet customer and human resource needs.

Faculty Supervisor:

Rebecca Todd;Todd Handy

Student:

Partner:

Lululemon

Discipline:

Business

Sector:

Other

University:

The University of British Columbia

Program: