Team,
I haven’t had a lot of opportunity to share my view on creativity and innovation. Today will be a great chance.
As you know, IMUNC is all about innovation. People used to think the I in IMUNC stands of innovative. Cabinets, MPC, Info Flow, Model Court…every major IMUNC committees is the result of creative thinking and reformation over the old system. Even Rio, our more “conventional” committee, challenges people’s presupposition of Model UN.
We do not set limits as to how creative you can be. However, there is a limit as to what type of committees can actually be brought into our conference.
Every major reformation in IMUNC history has been the result of years of research development. We didn’t start to implement our modern MPC until 2010, but we designed it as early as 2008. iCourt, designed in early 2010, implemented in late 2011. Info Flow, designed in 2008, implemented in 2011. SC, designed in 2008, implemented in 2011…We emphasize quality over innovation. That’s why only the best of our most creative committees can actually appear in our conferences. The time frame between the emergence of the idea and the actually implementation give us an opportunity to think back, sit down again and again before the drawing board, and make our product into near perfection.
Therefore, we are perfectionist before we become innovators. We always put quality over quantity.
Our ability to stay as the leader in Model UN lies not on how many new ideas we can come up with, but on how many not so great ideas we are willing to reject. It is easy to come up with some ideas, what IMUNC is good at is to make very few of them great. And that is my expectation to the current Board.
Four years ago when we started, people aren’t expecting much from us. Thereby, we got a lot more space to make mistakes. And we learnt a lot from these mistakes. We still make mistakes today, but as a national leader in the field of Model UN, there is much heavier responsibilities on our shoulder. Delegates come to IMUNC because they expect great experience out of it. It would be irresponsible to “test run” immature conference designs in these conferences.
I understand how you fee about your innovations. I felt the same way about mine three years ago. But what I’ve learnt in the last three years is there is always room to improve. When I came up with the Cabinet design, I thought it was the greatest conference setting one can think of. As you already know, the cabinet design underwent substantial changes over the last few years, and is still imperfect. Only when you look back to your previous innovations would you realize how silly they sometimes may seem.
Therefore, I would have to reject some of your great ideas. Many of them have great potentials: I believe more research and internal test runs will definitely make it workable in future IMUNC conferences. I would recommend all of you to keep thinking about these ideas and learn from others’ innovations. Your collaborations together will make IMUNC a more comprehensive experience.
Yuexin Han
Yuexin Han is the founder and Chairman of IMUNC. He also serves as the Chief of Staff of Central Student Government of University of Michigan