This section argues that creativity is a ubiquitous construct which is widely accessible and can be developed, not an innate capability that cannot be taught or learned. Creativity development is seen as beneficial for many reasons. It drives progress in many disciplinary fields from The Arts to Science, Economics and Technology yet “the philosophy of creativity is still a neologism in most quarters” (Paul and Kaufmann, 2014, 3). This study locates creativity within Maslow’s humanistic tradition of self-actualisation, the kind of creativity which “shows itself in the ordinary affairs of life”, manifests in an ability to “express ideas without strangulation” and “fear of ridicule”, involves an ability to “bring opposites together” and is a defining characteristic of health itself in self-actualizing humans (Maslow, 1968, 21).
Highly contested, multiple methods of conceptualizing, analysing and implementing creativity exist. Traditionally, within person centred creativity research and philosophy prior to the 1950s, the dominant belief was that only certain individuals could be creative. Kant in his Critique of Judgement originally published in 1762 espoused creativity as innate or celestially gifted
artistic genius, enabling production of exemplary original works, via a process which cannot be learned (Kant, 1790). Similarly, within Romanticism, imagination was the source of all creative power and the hero- artist according to the romantics, was the supreme creator who:
Struggles with the unconscious to give shape, truth and feeling (expression) to those forces – natural, spiritual and cultural (Peters, 2009, 42).
Wider contributions to the philosophical debate were fuelled by a wave of interest in modern creativity research, prompted by Guildford’s influential presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950 (Guilford, 1950) in which he challenged psychologists to attend to this neglected attribute of the human personality (Collins, 2010, 96). Following this address, Rhodes, making sense of the increased interest in the field of creativity inquiry (1961) categorised creativity research into the 4Ps of creativity: Creative Press; Creative Process; Creative Product; and Creative Person (Rhodes, 1961). Press, otherwise known as creative climate, refers to the pressure exerted by the psychosocial and structural climate. Creative Process literature covers both thinking processes within creative individuals and the processes involved in developing a creative product. Creative Product literature concentrates mainly on subjective criteria of the creative product.
Creative Person perspectives debate the extent to which creativity is innate in individuals. Perspectives range from the belief that creativity is innate and cannot be learned (this unique creativity is known as big C creativity), to those who subscribe to the existence of a generic everyday creativity which can be developed, (known as little c creativity). Many writers claim that little c is potentially present in everyone (Csikszentmihalyi, 1997; Banaji et al., 2010; Florida, 2012). Craft (2000), described little c in a broad analysis of creativity in education, commissioned by the UK Department of Education. She posited that this ubiquitous creativity is of benefit to the individual and society, employs imagination; permits possibility thinking and finding a way around emergent problems. Thus, the historical concept of creativity exclusive to the genius, was replaced and is no longer the dominant
creativity philosophy, at least within the educational context According to The Rise of The Creative Classes author, Richard Florida (2012):
Every human being is creative … the essential task before us is to unleash the creative energies, talent, and potential of everyone-to build a society that acknowledges and nurtures the creativity of each and every human being. Creativity is truly a limitless resource; it is something we all share (Florida, 2012, xi).
Contemporary HE creativity development debates suggest that creativity can be affected by environmental factors, indeed the volume of peer reviewed papers evidencing increased student creativity levels following pedagogical interventions, reinforces the premise that creativity is a construct that can be developed (Baillie, 2000; Craft, 2000; Morrison and Johnston, 2003; McCorkle et al., 2007; Sternberg and Kaufman, 2007; Karakas, 2010; Chen and Chen, 2011; Karpova, Marcketti and Barker, 2011).
This thesis adopts the dominant belief in a creativity which is potentially present in everyone and which can be developed. Creativity is understood as an accessible construct and is defined as the “generation of effective novelty” (Cropley and Cropley, 2009, 25). Establishing that the kind of creativity we are discussing is potentially accessible to everyone, is of significant importance, because if creativity were considered a biological attribute, exclusive to certain individuals, then any attempt to develop creative potential by elucidating the attributes of an environment conducive to creativity and innovation, would be unproductive and there would be little to gain from conducting a research study like this one which aims to uncover and understand the attributes of the HE environment supportive of academic creativity and innovation, via close examination of the NPDV process.
We turn now to examine the concept of innovation. Linked to creativity, it is relevant to this research as higher education policies at Irish state and at EU level strongly reference innovation development in HE as a strategic imperative (European Commission, 2003, 2018a; Expert group on future skills needs, 2015):
Co-operation between universities and industry needs to be intensified at national and regional level, as well as geared more
effectively towards innovation (European Commission, 2003, sec. 3.3-14).
Innovation is seen as key to the emergence of the European knowledge society and is widely promoted in education policies in Ireland and across the EU. Innovation is generally understood as the process of implementation of creative endeavour and it is the term attributed to the deliberate provision of supports and mechanisms for creativity execution. Innovation has been defined as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organisation (Amabile, 1996).
The terminology associated with the concept of innovation is aligned more closely than that of creativity to the knowledge society drivers in higher education. Efficiency, quality and competitiveness are constructs commonly associated with innovation. Located within the disciplines of economics and business, innovation is seen as the stimulus for economic and enterprise growth. The Austrian economist, Schumpeter (1943) argued that economic change centres around innovation and that the incentive for new product development is provided by the temporary monopolies often created by technological innovation (Carroll Pol and Carroll, 2006). Schumpeter believed that firms should “incessantly revolutionize the economic structure from within” by continuous creation of more effective processes and products (Schumpeter, 1943, 81–84). Schumpeter’s conceptualisation of innovation focuses on the implementation and marketisation of the new and is defined by end user exposure and commercialisation. Similarly, O’ Sullivan and Dooley (2008), equate innovation with the exploitation of creative concepts (O’Sullivan and Dooley, 2008), implying that the creative impetus is a precursor to the innovative process. Thus, innovation is regarded as the support and facilitation mechanism for the implementation of creative initiatives. For this study, a definition of innovation is employed, which does not attach itself exclusively to marketisation, commercialisation and business, but one which acknowledges the implementation mechanism of innovation and the prior essential creative input, without which there would be no execution. This study defines innovation as: “the process of deliberate insertion of beneficial novelty into a functioning system” (Cropley & Cropley, 2009, 27). The innovation focus in business and economics is on
the exploitation of the creative concept, with negligible emphasis on the human creative input required prior to innovation process engagement. In the main, commercial creativity and innovation process models concentrate on the implementation of creativity (the innovation phase) and do not emphasise the creative idea generation phase.
Yet Amabile’s (1988, 2012) models of creativity and innovation in organisations place great importance on the process of individual creativity as a crucial element in the organisational innovation process (Amabile, 1988). Her research into creativity and innovation in commercial organisations might be interpreted as leaning towards the humanistic perspective, given that it crosses from the commercial field into that of psychological inquiry, emphasising the cognitive attributes and motivational drivers of creativity in individuals and teams. Her models are explored further in sections 2-6 and 2-7 of this chapter.
Whilst remaining conscious of the potentially different ideological focuses between the HE and the commercial environments (which are explored later), education systems could learn from innovation research studies conducted in commercial organisations. Having found only one Canadian model in the literature theorising the new programme or product development innovation process in the higher education sector (Wolf, 2007), I reviewed some of the innovation models developed for contemporary commercial organisations in an early attempt to uncover the underlying conditions and processes of an organisational climate conducive of creativity and innovation.
A review of commercial organisational innovation process models provided me with three key points which could be considered when developing a model in HE to support a creative and innovative climate. These included:
The importance of a sequentially staged support process. Some of the models involved sequential, incremental and involved time- sequenced stages (Godin 2006, Cooper 1990). For example, Booz, Allen and Hamilton’s new product development process has seven sequential stages: idea generation, screening and evaluation, business analysis, development, testing and commercialisation (Booz, Allen and Hamilton, 1982). Learning from these models to support innovation, processes should be broken down into stages,
and the issues relevant to each stage should be addressed in timely fashion.
The acknowledgement that the organisation must be responsive to the external environment. The network model of innovation highlights a necessity for external linkages within the innovation process (Rothwell and Zegveld, 1985) and Chesborough’s (2003) open innovation model extends the boundaries of innovation beyond the firm.
The benefits of cross disciplinary fertilisation of ideas. The Cyclic Innovation Model (CIM) depicts innovation as a cyclical process where new innovations build upon previous innovations (Berkhout et al., 2007). Relevant to the HE context, CIM model designers suggest that institutional cultures with deeply rooted disciplinary boundaries will find cross disciplinary innovation fertilisation difficult to implement (Berkhout, Hartmann and Trott, 2010) and this would have to be consciously generated in the HE culture, as it is in the organisational and cultural configurations of firms like Google (Steiber and Alänge, 2012; Knapp, 2015).
This study of innovation organisational support systems has highlighted the need for interaction beyond the boundaries of the organisation; the benefits of breaking disciplinary boundaries leading to cross-disciplinary fertilisation and the importance of sequencing supports as required at different stages of the innovation process.
The emphasis in this review on commercial process creativity and innovation research is due in part to a relative research deficit into creativity and innovation support systems within higher educational organisations. Only one (Canadian) model specifically designed to provide in-depth iterative and ongoing HE curriculum development innovation support, inside a HEI, has been uncovered in this review (Wolf, 2007). Another, less process orientated curriculum initiative, includes workshops in the UK to support ideation in curriculum development (Dempster, Benfield and Francis, 2012) and at a higher level, an EU initiative has been undertaken aimed at HEI management, to raise awareness of the need to promote creativity and innovation strategically in HEIs across Europe. This is called HEInnovate and we will return to this later (European Commission, 2014). Though there have been many philosophical papers on the potential for imaginative curriculum development and a more creative kind of ‘life-wide’ programme development design in HE (Jackson, 2011), studies with in-depth review of
innovation supports in HE for curriculum development uncovered in this research, are limited.
We can infer from the HE curriculum development innovation process research and HE creative climate research deficits, that relative to the commercial sector, innovation in the higher education context has not been systematically theorised to the same extent. We might also infer that the extensive research that commercial environments have undertaken, proves their willingness to invest in uncovering and understanding the mechanisms required to facilitate and support organisational creativity. Thus, it is argued, there is a need for more research related to academic creativity and innovation support in higher educational environments, that is if the development of creativity and innovation in the HE environment is considered beneficial.