Abstract

This paper explores the view that a ‘hole’ exists in Business Education where creativity should be. The ‘creative graduate’ is essential in an increasingly competitive market. (IBM 2010) However, creativity is not seen as being part of the mainstream university curriculum as executives fail to see its importance (Jackson, 2014).
Creativity should be characterised by openness and freedom, but until policy makers like QAA explicitly include creativity into subject benchmarks, little will change (Jackson and Shaw, 2006, 2015). The ‘machinery of targets, measurement and control’ minimises creativity (Simmons and Thompson, 2008) and creative pedagogy is all but killed by standardization and stringent performance targets (Banaji and Burn, 2007).
This research focused on 3 groups of students from a NE England university through and beyond a creativity intervention. There were two phases of data gathering. In the first phase, before the intervention, their opinions about creativity and its value/role in business were collected. Throughout the programme, feedback was gathered around specific sessions and an evaluation of the research themes was collated. Phase 2 took place 6-12 months later and consisted of semi-structured interviews. Participants related their experiences about whether the intervention was being translated into actions and behaviours at work.
Despite being a small-scale single university study, it provides rich detail of the experience of a creativity intervention. A novel feature is the consideration of the longitudinal impact. The results provide support for the growing literature which calls for creativity to become a mainstream element in the curriculum (Foresights 2015).
Key words – Creativity, Higher Education, Business Curriculum, Personal Creativity, Organisational Creativity