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These musings are prompted by the ongoing dialogue on creativity.  I am an "old guy" currently completing a dissertation entitled An Investigation of Training in Creative Problem Solving and its Relationship to Affective and Effective Idea Generation of Entrepreneurial Learners as part of a degree in Computing Technology in Education.  My views are the result of an eclectic set of experiences including: a 20 year career as an entrepreneur serving the needs of mechanical and electrical engineers, education as an accountant and an MBA, mentor for the lead entrepreneur of four high tech start ups and co-director for a national (675 students annually in Canada) month long residential program for gifted grade 11 and 12 students with interests in math, science, engineering and entrepreneurship.  Yes, I have spent month of July for the past four years with 50 high energy high school students 24/7 working with faculty members from engineering, math and computer science.  Along the way I and a colleague in electrical engineering, Dr. <st1:personname w:st="on">Tim Little</st1:personname>, have explored a variety of ways to bring creativity training into the classroom (Leach, 2007; Leach & Little, 2004).

MEASUREMENT

There is an article by Michael Couger written from the engineering side that does a nice job delineating the tools for measuring creativity and placing creativity in context (Couger et al., 1990).  There have been several references to Michael Kirton's work and the use of the KAI (Kirton Adaption Innovation Inventory) (Kirton, 1976a, 1976b, 1985a, 1985b, 1989).  I had completed the KAI as part of a course on Human Computer Interaction and scored a 152/160 indicating that I was 5 standard deviations off the norm and had an unusual preference for being innovative creative.  It was not until I spoke with Michael Kirton that I was able to appreciate what the instrument measured and how it was to be used.  He pointed out that the instrument was designed to be used by accredited psychoanalysts who needed to complete a training program.  When completed the analyst would then be able to integrate the instrument into their psychotherapy practice.  He took pains to point out that the use of the instrument by untrained practitioners like myself was inappropriate and unsanctioned.  At that time (2003) he had discontinued the sale of the instrument to unaccredited users. He did point out in the process that the KAI instrument did not "measure how creative we are but rather how we are creative -  our preference for being creative".  He further pointed out that significant differences in KAI scores require "coping" behaviors for team members to be able to be functional.  Another measure of preference for creativity is the Creative Problem Solving Profile (CPSP) developed by Basadur.  In one study it was found that a disproportionate number of the business students fell into the optimizer (37%) and implementer (33%) quadrants while only 13% fell into the generator and 17% into the conceptualizer quadrants (Basadur et al., 1990).

THE ROLE OF CREATIVITY IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP EDUCATION

If creativity is seen as an enabling pedagogy in the production of entrepreneurial ideas (Hisrich & Peters, 2001; Kuratko & Hodgetts, 2003; Kuratko & Welsch, 2003; Timmons & Spinelli, 2004, 2006) then it is important to understand the relationships between creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.  Creativity is the production of novel and appropriate solutions to any domain of human activity.  Innovation is the implementation of the ideas generated in the creative process.  Entrepreneurship can then be said to be a particular form of innovation that results in the creation of a new business, or a new initiative within an existing business.  Entrepreneurial creativity can include ideas that may have to do with: products or services themselves, identifying a market, ways of producing or delivering, ways of obtaining resources (Amabile, 1997). Amabile's early work suggested that while intrinsic motivation is conducive to creativity, extrinsic motivation is detrimental (Amabile, 1983).  When creativity is encouraged in educational settings dissonance is likely to result as creative behaviours are often out of tune with the behaviours that lead to academic success.  In the educational system it is acknowledged that breaking the rules is what makes you smarter yet this behaviour may well lead to confrontation with instructors (Mauzy et al., 2003).

Recent articles suggest that creativity has a role in opportunity recognition dependent on which model one subscribes to.  The cognitive explanation suggest that training in creativity could assist in enhancing pattern recognition skills (Baron, 2004, 2006).  If you subscribe to the view that opportunities have objective existence over time and that the nexus of the opportunity, prior knowledge and the entrepreneur allow specific entrepreneurs to discover/recognize specific opportunities then creativity training could assist in making links across information corridors.  Saranson sees the nexus as a duality and uses a structuration approach that opportunities are not objective, persistent over time and awaiting discovery.  "The structuration view presents entrepreneurial ventures as recursive processes that evolve as the entrepreneur interfaces with the sources of opportunity and engages in the venturing process." (Sarason et al., 2006)  Creativity training in this context as providing tool to the entrepreneur to better interpret and influence their environment.

INNOVATIVENESS EQUALS GOODNESS

In the early dialogue in this thread I perceived that innovativeness was being equated with the quality of an idea – the more innovative it was the better it was.  In one recent investigation of the impact of creativity training the KAI was used as an independent variable and novelty/innovativeness used to rank the quality of the resulting ideas.(DeTienne & Chandler, 2004).  The coring of innovativeness was based on work done by Fiet (Fiet, 2002).  Perhaps the view that innovative ideas are superior is related to the process of creative destruction first identified by Schumpter (J.A. Schumpeter, 1934a, 1934b, 1936; J. A. Schumpeter, 1942).  This seems at odds with Bhave's  suggestion that innovative ventures are far riskier and typically take longer to initiate (Bhave, 1994).  It also seems at odds with my conversations with a colleague who is a former patent agent who suggests that the 80-85% of patents are filed for adaptations to existing patents.

I am currently working my way through the logic to support the view that a quality idea is first and foremost one that the entrepreneur is passionate about and feels a sense of connectedness with.  It is this fire in the belly that will allow the entrepreneur to commit the personal energy needed to see them through venture.  In making this suggestion I am not for a minute suggesting that the venture screening tools proposed by Timmons and others are inappropriate (Timmons & Spinelli, 2006) but rather that they need to be augmented to explicitly include the commitment/connectedness dimension.  

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