The Creative Engineer: Oxymoron Or Entrepreneur?

The Creative Engineer: Oxymoron or Entrepreneur?

At first glance, creativity doesn’t seem like a difficult concept. Creative people are either geniuses who pump out innovative ideas day and night, or they are ordinary individuals who experience a sudden flash of genius, only to fade back into normality. This definition of creativity, along with many of the other versions an average person might come up with, is fundamentally flawed: it implies that people don’t have a choice in whether or not they could generate innovative ideas. This interpretation is extremely discouraging for anyone hoping to be successful in the age of technology, where ingenuity has replaced intelligence as the most important quality a person can possess. Luckily, creativity is not just an entity that some people possess and others don’t; it is a skill that people should strive to advance. Creativity and its development are common topics for psychologists and academics, and a plethora of research has been conducted on this subject.

Edward de Bono utilizes “Creativity Workout” to define creativity and explain why it is one of the most important features a person can possess. Before this can be explored further, however, an unrelenting misconception must be

While Goodman and Goodman leave the semantics up to the reader and instead jump right into applications of creativity, de Bono is more direct with his definition: “creativity is bringing into existence something that has value” (66). Such a straight-forward definition allows one to systematically categorize certain ideas as innovative or repetitive, but doesn’t take into consideration people’s individual tastes, and how they may change over time. Csikszentmihalyi proposes a definition that accounts for such