Creativity the WHOLE or the HOLE in Business Education

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 Creativit

Visual images: a technique to surface conceptions of research and researchers

Purpose – This article presents pictorial representation as an innovative and challenging technique for exploring how new and experienced researchers see research and researchers. Pictorial representation provides a means of exploring the various factors that may influence, limit or inhibit researchers in their practice. Design/methodology/approach – Three groups were engaged in creating pictorial representations of either “research” or “researchers”. Groups of new doctorate in Business Administration students, second year PhD students and a network of women academic staff from two UK university business schools described their drawings to their group and engaged in general discussion of the issues raised. Findings – Drawing and discussing pictures allows emotional and unconscious aspects of engaging in research to surface, helping drawers put into words what may be difficult to voice. Such images enrich and enliven the difficult area of research methods teaching and their personal nature helps to “acknowledge the individual in the researcher”. Research limitations/implications – This paper is based on research with a small number of participants. It focuses on the use of the visual image technique, rather than detailed analysis of the images generated. Practical implications – We offer the technique to teachers of research methods who can use it to make research methods more interesting and relevant to their students. Originality/value – The paper outlines an innovative approach to teaching research methods which engages students in discussion about the nature of research, the skills and qualities needed to become effective researchers and assists them to begin the difficult but essential process of reflexivity

Family learning in the workplace: nurturing lifelong learning.

Lifelong learning must become a reality for all employees if we are to create and sustain organizations which can survive in the knowledge economy of the future. But how do we engage those who never access training and development opportunities at work? In this article it is argued that these people may be attracted back to learning by offering them opportunities at work to learn with their families. This different method of facilitating lifelong learning is examined here. The benefits to business and the wider community of encouraging families to learn together at work are explored. It is concluded that the addition of family learning in organisations to our current range of training and development activities can engage a new constituency in learning at work and can model the importance of lifelong learning to a new generation of future employees

Academic women in the UK: Mainstreaming our experiences and networking for action

This article presents the experiences of women academics of management in the UK, who have used informal, collective strategies to move on, to mainstream their experiences and to challenge existing boundaries of management and their organisations. Having identified the repeating patterns of inequalities in management and management education as women academics, researchers and managers, the authors had to turn to action, to progress and to work on some solutions. This article explores the moving on process by presenting the experiences of women academics of management from two perspectives. Firstly, women academics' stories of their careers and their experience of management are outlined as an emancipatory consciousness-raising process. Secondly, the issues of moving on, taking action and challenging existing boundaries are discussed by means of a case study of a group of women academics who have chosen to question the confines of their working lives whilst gaining credibility in a changing context and driving some of the change for themselves. We offer the process we have engaged in as a strategy to support academic women to move on through critical reflection and action