Creativity and Innovation
What: The capacity for Creativity & Innovation equips learners to produce meaning and value for an audience, develop and apply imaginative solutions to complex problems, and incorporate feedback in an ongoing and iterative improvement process. Creativity and Innovation foster the self-confidence and imagination necessary to innovate boldly and to bring a product or solution to fruition.
Why: The capacity to effectively create and innovate builds resilience in the face of persistent disruption by helping learners develop tools to reframe obstacles as opportunities. Creative thinking incorporates multiple perspectives to solve durable challenges that resist easy answers while continuously improving on those solutions in response to new information.
Creativity and Innovation Capacity
Recognize opportunities for creativity and innovation.
- Survey the social, cultural, commercial, or scholarly landscape to observe gaps that new ideas can fill.
- Understand the interests of audiences and users.
- Synthesize prior creative, intellectual, or professional inspiration and context that might inform new creative or innovative solutions.
- Recognize the relative scale and complexity of challenges that lend themselves to creative solutions (including wicked problems).
Identify and describe the intention and value of the innovative work or solution.
- Express the objectives of the creative or innovative process.
- Advocate for the artifact or solution via diverse channels of communication.
- Demonstrate clear and purposeful organizational structure expressing ideas.
Execute creative and innovative projects and solutions.
- Propose innovative ideas for solving strategic problems or expressing personal creative inspiration.
- Assess available resources needed to accomplish specific creative or strategic initiatives.
- Connect with social networks, institutions, or other collaborative partners to accomplish creative or strategic initiatives.
- In the absence of clear guidelines, undertake plans and prototypes and work out the first steps.
Iteratively improve their creative and innovative ideas.
- Determine and apply appropriate means for assessing the success or failure of creative or strategic work.
- Respond to self-critique, external critique, and audience participation with iterative improvements.
- Adapt plans and prototypes to changing conditions and unexpected outcomes, and resume progress following preliminary failures or dead ends.
- Complete the iterative learning cycle to yield a creative artifact or solution for others’ appreciation, consumption, or use.