Editor’s Note: Our research team came across this
material produced by Griffith University.
Griffith
University,
named after Sir Samuel Walker Griffith, a former Queensland
Premier, Chief Justice of Queensland and the Chief Justice of Australia,
was
founded in 1975 and has grown to become one of Australia's most
innovative
tertiary institutions. More importantly Griffith University has one of
the most
exciting approaches of incorporating the teaching creativity and
innovation into the graduate curricula of its students of any university
in
the world.
Griffith
University publishes the Griffith
Graduate Attributes Creativity and Innovation Toolkit. The publication is
in its second edition. The university
describes the purpose of the Toolkit, developed by members of the Griffith
Graduate Project, as intended primarily for academic staff. The toolkit offers an
overview of some of the main issues related to developing students’ graduate
skills during their degree studies.
Here are some excerpts from
it on the definitions of creativity and innovation across several disciplines
(with all references included).
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Image source: www.huffingtonpost.com
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Definitions
Creativity is not confined to the visual and performing arts
– it is an essential ingredient of all disciplines and professions.
Creativity is the ability to make something new, whether a
thought or idea, an object, a product or a process, a work of art or
performance, or an interpretation. Usually, this involves making connections
with an existing knowledge base, using imagination, experimenting, taking
risks, having fun and making the jump from what is already known or experienced
to what is, or might be. Creativity is a difficult concept to pin down, but
here are some definitions that reflect its complexity:
“Personal creativity is: a process of becoming sensitive to
or aware of problems, deficiencies, and gaps in knowledge for which there is no
learned solution; bringing together existing information from the memory
storage or external; defining the difficulty or identifying the missing
elements; searching for solutions, making guesses, producing alternatives to
solve the problem; testing and re-testing these alternatives; and perfecting
them and finally communicating the results.”
Morrison, A., & Johnston, B. (2003). Personal creativity
for entrepreneurship: Teaching and learning strategies. Active Learning in
Higher Education, 4(2), pp. 145-158. (Retrieved from the World Wide
Web 4th April, 2005).
“The creative individual is a person who regularly solves
problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that
is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a
particular cultural setting.”
Gardner, H. (1993). Creating Minds. An Anatomy of
Creativity Seen Through the Lives of Freud, Picasso, Stravinsky, Eliot, Graham
and Gandhi. New York: Basic Books, p. 35.
“Creativity…involves departing from the facts, finding new
ways, making unusual associations, or seeing unexpected solutions.”
Cropley, A.J. (2001). Creativity in Education and
Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. London: Kogan Page, p. 23.
Cropley (2001) identified three main vehicles for creativity:
products;
people; and
the environment.
He argues that creativity can manifest itself in:
• products that
take the form of works of art, musical compositions, written documents,
machines, buildings, or other physical structures such as bridges; in plans and
strategies for solving problems in business, manufacturing, government, etc.;
in thoughts or ideas - systems for conceptualizing the world (e.g., philosophy,
mathematics, or indeed all reflective disciplines);
• people, through clusters of psychological factors
involving abilities, knowledge, skills, motives, attitudes and values, as well
as personal properties such as openness, flexibility or courage – some of which
are inherited, but some of which can be learned; and
• environment by factors such as tolerance for
novelty, encouragement and recognition, contact with models of creative
behaviour and exposure to works of art, literature, and people who foster
creativity.
Adapted from: Cropley, A.J. (2001). Creativity in
Education and Learning: A Guide for Teachers and Educators. London: Kogan
Page, p.p. 6-7.
“Being innovative is closely related to being creative.
Seeing possibilities, seizing opportunities, creating new ventures, markets or
products are all part and parcel of innovation. An innovator is someone who has
an idea, sees its potential, and sets about promoting, or advocating it to a
wider audience, often with profit in mind. In this sense, entrepreneurship is
closely related to the term ‘innovation.’ In 2003, the National Commission on
Entrepreneurship (UK) defined entrepreneurship as ‘the process of uncovering
and developing an opportunity to create value through innovation.’”
National Commission on Entrepreneurship. (2003). Creating
Good Jobs in Your Community. Cited in Moreland, N. (2004). Entrepreneurship
and Higher Education: An Employability Perspective.
(Retrieved from the World Wide Web on 4th April, 2005)
http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/resources.asp?process=full_record§ion=generic&id=341
Disciplinary
interpretations of “creativity”:
Creativity means different things to different people, and in
different disciplines. Here’s a sample of disciplinary interpretations from
academic staff at Griffith University:
Business
In business, the terms are usually associated with
“entrepreneurship,” or the process of recognizing opportunities for new
commercial ventures and acting upon them, usually in the face of risk. The
skills needed to be an entrepreneur include: observation of the market, insight
into customer needs, invention, innovation, a willingness to take risks,
securing outside investment, delivering the product or service, financing,
marketing and management.
In marketing, Dr Joo-Gim Heaney (Griffith Business
School, Griffith University), says that creativity is closely linked with the
personal process of coming up with new inventions, processes or ideas.
Innovation is more a social process of transforming that invention into a commercially
viable product (Barclay & Benson, 1990; Rickards, 1991). In this sense,
marketers are looking at creativity as the source of ideas that can hopefully
be turned into profitable and useful innovations that meet consumer needs.
Barclay, I., & Benson, M. (1990). Success in new product
development: The lessons from the past. Leadership and Organization
Development Journal, 11(6), p.p. 4-13);
Rickards, T. (1991). Innovation and creativity: Woods, trees
and pathways. R&D Management, 21(2), p.p. 97-109.
Criminology
Dr Merrelyn Bates, School of Criminology and Criminal
Justice, sees creativity in her field as a means of addressing issues and
problems in the criminal justice system. For her, the starting point is to
understand the criminal justice system, because without this the criminologist
would find it had to “know” whether the issue is systemic, resource-based,
historical or cultural, etc. Each innovation requires evaluation and ongoing
research to ensure that there is ongoing efficacy and currency.
For example, crime affects all sections of our society and as
a result, crime prevention strategies are developed in order to address
different issues, e.g., the innovative initiatives for curbing graffiti on
public buildings adopted by many local councils in Queensland - relevant
council sections, police and other appropriate agencies (usually youth-related)
meet regularly to identify “hot spots” and develop strategies to curb the
graffiti; the pilot program for a drug court; and the “whole-of-government”
initiative developed in the court sector to rehabilitate drug offenders, who
face correctional sentences only if they lapse. Creativity and innovation for a
criminologist, therefore, are directly connected to applied knowledge.
Design
Mr Paul Barnes, Queensland College of Art, Griffith
University, sees four major aspects of creativity in his discipline: an
inquisitive mind; a keen eye on the world around; knowledge of the elements and
principles of design; and a passion to experiment. In his opinion, they all
have roles to play, but, when pressed, says that the fourth is the keystone of
creativity.
Engineering
Professor David Theil, from the School of
Microelectronic Engineering at Griffith University, sees creativity as
requiring a knowledge of the technology, and an understanding of the human
condition, both locally and around the world. The latter is far more difficult
and can be very individual. Microelectronic engineering is a leading edge
technology field that has two objectives – to solve existing problems (market
pull), and to create new futures (technology push). All developments are
designed to improve the human condition in the broadest of terms. This includes
new products created with minimal environmental impact, both from the product
itself and its manufacture.
Dr Philip Williams, from Griffith’s School of
Environmental Engineering, believes that creativity is an important and
essential part of environmental engineering. Indeed, part of the rationale for
the emergence and development of environmental engineering, he says, was the
recognition that in order to solve environmental problems, engineers would need
more than the old traditional, and largely technically-focused skills. Thus,
environmental engineers recognize it is necessary to think “outside the square”
to solve complex issues. Such solutions require a variety of inputs, including,
not just technical, but economic, social and environmental perspectives as
well. This is often described as an holistic approach, as distinct from the
older, “end of pipe,” where a problem would be accepted as inevitable and a
“technical fix” would be implemented. The holistic approach, therefore, can
result in a variety of possible innovative solutions.
Environmental engineering students at Griffith develop their
creativity by being exposed to a diverse range of courses, which include the
natural and social sciences as well as the usual engineering sciences and
mathematics. They learn a variety of viewpoints, e.g., that the environment is
fragile, that people are critically important and that their work must be
sustainable.
Humanities
According to Associate Professor Patrick Buckridge, School of
Arts, Media and Culture at Griffith, creativity is intrinsic to the discipline
itself. He believes that creativity is a crucial component of all worthwhile
work in the humanities disciplines, not just in those areas (Creative Writing,
Screen Production) that have tended to monopolize the label, but in the broader
academic study of literature, history, language, philosophy, social life and
popular culture.
He understands creativity to mean: the ability to discover
and articulate new meanings; devise new arguments or syntheses; and find new
ways of extending, modifying or contesting existing arguments or syntheses,
within a given field of social and cultural phenomena.
The reason that “creativity” is a good term to invoke for
this is that the connection between doing all the things you need to do as
preparation, on the one hand, and actually coming up with the idea that will
lead to the new argument, on the other, can be quite unpredictable and a bit
mysterious, presumably because it comes out of the subconscious mind as it
continues to work on problems put to it by the conscious mind.
The creative dynamic to him, therefore, always involves two
phases: “immersion” and “articulation.” The process of immersion, whether it is
in personal “life experience,” or in a literary work, an historical period, a
particular community or subculture, or a philosophical system, is the necessary
prerequisite to a new argument or synthesis – without it, any new argument is
likely to be thin and derivative at best, unguided by a personal but holistic
understanding of the field that “immersion” can provide.
By the same token, the task
of articulating, expressing and communicating is essential, not only in order
to transmit new insights to others, but also in order to bring the idea,
argument or synthesis itself to completion. Without it, the immersion phase can
produce only passive empathy and passive learning.
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