MAN 0331M Creativity and Innovation

2014/5 - Semester 1 Assignment

Deadline: 3pm, Monday, 15th December 2014

Assignment Background:

The Oxford Dictionary describes creativity as an adjective “relating to or involving the use of the imagination or original ideas to create something.”

Burns (2011, p111) explains that, “creativity is important in coming up with completely new ways of doing things, rather than looking for adaptive, incremental change.” He further sites Pankhurst who defines creativity as “the ability or quality displayed when solving hitherto unsolved problems, when developing original and novel solutions to problems others have solved differently, or when developing original and novel (at least to its originator) products or services.”

Professor Leonard of Harvard Business School (Leonard, 2010) truncates this to, “creativity is a process of developing and expressing novel ideas that are likely to be useful.” Leonard (2010) goes on to explain that whilst creativity is the process of generating ideas, innovation is the output of creativity, whether in the form of “products, processes or services”.

Though both Burns (2011) and Leonard (2010) refer to products and services this is very much a narrow interpretation of the creative and innovative process. It is possible to be creative and innovative in a range of contexts from science to the arts. The crucial elements are of ‘newness’ in terms of creativity and something of ‘value’ in the context of innovation. Furthermore we must differentiate innovation from invention, which is one form of innovation. At the heart of any definitions is the issue of creative problem solving using both divergent and convergent thinking.

This is the context of the module and the assignment tasks. Through the assignment you are required to demonstrate your understanding of creativity and innovation in theory and practice. The assignment is designed to examine (1) your understanding of creativity and innovation (C&I), (2) consequent application of C&I and (3) resultant learning from the process.

Assignment Tasks

Your assignment task is to produce an INDIVIDUAL C&I PORTFOLIO. This will constitute a total word count of 2,000 words, excluding appendices, tables and cover pages.

Components of the C&I Portfolio

1. C&I Discussion – This is where you will discuss using ‘appropriate literature’ what is creativity and innovation, the difference between creativity and innovation and why they are important in context of a knowledge based economy. A range of resources will be cited through the course of the module and made available through Blackboard. A useful starting point is to look at the work of Sir Ken Robinson who is a passionate advocate of creative thinking and equating the importance of creativity with literacy, “Creativity is as important now in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.”

2. Reflection – Discuss what you have personally learnt by completing the C&I Challenges (details to be provided in class) and participating in the sessions and activities through the course of the module. This should include how you would enhance you own C&I skills and capabilities in the future.

3. Log & Peer Feedback – Through the course of the module you will need to maintain a log (diary) of the activities you carry out as part of the module. This would include activities you carry out in class, in your ‘team’ or individually. To help you with completing the reflective component it may be useful to make