Creativity
is a vital tool in engineering and fundamental component
of innovation as innovation is the real
product of the creativity implementation.
Industry became obsessive with innovations as the essential
driver for growth and sometimes the only
solution for some organizations survival. Thus there is
an eagerness to boost creativity within companies.
Benefits from creativity can be quite valuable for organizations.
Many companies accepted creativity as
the quite important feature of running a business and they
highlight the following benefits of creativity;
- generates new types of products and finds niches in markets
- improves products functions and products market value
- improves internal efficiency and effectiveness of organization
- reduces internal costs and raises profitability of organization
- elevates company recognition on a market as a leader
- simplifies problem solving with more effective improvements
- leads to consistency of innovating at the company
- motivates people
Creativity is certainly one of the most important human's
abilities. All products around us and most of
changes made to our world are results of creativity.
Design, Engineering and R&D groups are expected to
be the main sources of creativity for the products
and technologies. Creativity is usually expected from those
teams because of tasks performed by those
engineers and because their creativity is assumed. Most
of researchers highlight tight relation between
engineering and creativity including statement "If
engineers are not creative, they are not engineers".
Companies should search for creative engineers and should
have a tool to unleash and evaluate those
skills on engineering. If design and engineering teams
do not present satisfying creativity level then
those skills should be developed through a proper training.
Formal education prefers critical thinking with focuses
on skills of analysis, of understanding, logical
explanation, of right answers, on elimination of the incorrect
results and on providing the correct ones.
The other kind of thinking is a creative thinking that
focuses on exploring ideas, generating possibilities,
breaking standards, thinking differently, looking for many
different answers rather than just one.
Both types of thinking are important and usually used in
turn when problems are to be solved when we
analyze the problem and then we generate possible solutions.
Creativity skills are neglected by formal education and
those skills are not taught at majority of schools.
Those skills are not well understood and are usually considered
as a special gift related mostly to artistic
creativeness. This is maybe a reason of the public surveys
results indicating that only 3% of population
associates creativity with engineering.
Creativity is usually described as mental ability to generate
and imagine original ideas. There should be
be nothing mystical about creativity if we try to view
it as a technique of thinking that can be explained
as; - "Creativity is a mental skill to process information
using techniques appropriate for generating the
new original ideas by combining and changing the existing
ideas" -.
It is evident that some individuals are much more creative
than others and it looks like a lot of creativity
comes usually from beyond our conscious thinking, but existence
of creativity measurements and
stimulation techniques proved that creativity can be understood,
enhanced and learned. Creativity is
formed by simultaneous interaction of knowledge, creative
thinking with motivation and results are
proportional to strength of each of these elements. Weakness
of any of these components may disable
creativity, but high potency of knowledge, creative thinking
and motivation produces limitless ideas.
Creativity as the other human skills can be learned and
continuously improved, and as any other skill
creative thinking requires practicing for its development.
That can be done by taking various creativity
tests, by practicing with the creativity methods and with
proper exercises. |
