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Creativity the WHOLE or the HOLE in Business Education

Drady, Kym, Bryans, Patricia and Mearns, Lesley (2016) Creativity the WHOLE or the HOLE in Business Education. Proceedings of the International Business Conference 2016: Searching for Innovative and Creative Business Solutions (pp.67-74).. pp. 67-74.

Item Type: Article

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

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More Information

Depositing User: Kym Drady

Identifiers

Item ID: 9466
URI: http://sure.sunderland.ac.uk/id/eprint/9466
Official URL: http://www.viko.lt/media/uploads/sites/3/2016/07/9...

Users with ORCIDS

Catalogue record

Date Deposited: 17 May 2018 13:27
Last Modified: 18 Dec 2019 16:06

Contributors

Author: Kym Drady
Author: Patricia Bryans
Author: Lesley Mearns

University Divisions

Faculty of Business, Law and Tourism
Faculty of Business, Law and Tourism > Sunderland Business School

Subjects

Business and Management > Business

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