Creativity & Innovation
The 21st century is marked by the rise of life and work environments complexity.
To face this complexity, soft skills such as sense making, critical thinking, creativity, open-mindedness, inter-disciplinary and experiential learning, communication and collaboration skills have become increasingly necessary to resolve managerial and innovative issues (Ibarra, 2015*). Consequently, today, these learning and innovation skills have become critical in student's education.
The MBI program supports students to enhance their hard and soft skills and help them better identify, analyze and generate new ideas and opportunities as well as develop innovation. The program is designed to leverage creativity capability all along the curriculum.
Innovation is nothing without creativity. Everything starts with an idea.
"Any creative idea getting implemented or realized successfully is innovation"
- Macies Soltynski
Creation was for long time considered as an act of god only. Nothing was possible to create as it was considered that the "creator" did everything. Even non-religious people were considering that human creation through art was only an imitation or a copy of "mother" nature. With the renaissance in Europe, more consideration has been given to the individual and his/her creative ability. Since then, creativity has been considered as a "gift" given to certain people.
Can creativity be taught?
Recent studies (Finch et al., 201510)* highlights that creativity can be nurture and enhance by tactics to push the boundaries of norms to become creative.
Nickerson** investigated different creative techniques developed by the academia and the industry as:
- Establishing purpose and intention
- Building basic skills
- Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
- Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
- Building motivation, especially internal motivation
- Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
- Focusing on mastery and self-competition
- Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
- Providing opportunities for choice and discovery
- Developing self-management (metacognitive skills)
- Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
- Providing balance
