Thesis (MTech (Business Administration))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2019 / Background: Retail in South Africa is a growing industry, but new demands and the influx of foreign competition require retail business managers to be more creative in solving modern-day complex retail problems. An embedded outcome of the registered National Diploma: Retail Business Management qualification offered by the Cape Peninsula University of Technology is that students should be able to identify business problems and creatively make sound business decisions to solve these problems. However, because creativity is such a diverse topic, it seems that educational institutions and educators do not commit themselves to and evade the development of creativity. Consequently, this leads to graduates being ill-prepared in creatively solving the complex and often unique business problems they encounter in the Wholesale and Retail sector. Objectives: The objective of this study was to determine the creativity profile of Retail Business Management students and evaluate the progress of their creativity levels from their first- to third year. This approach evaluated if the embedded outcome of creativity was met for the National Diploma: Retail Business Management qualification. Methodology: Empirical research was conducted by collecting a combination of quantitative and qualitative data to determine the creativity levels of Retail Business Management students. A questionnaire consisting of both qualitative- and quantitative questions was used to evaluate the creativity levels of 159 full-time students and 16 students from the retail industry studying through the university’s Retail Academy. Quantitative data were analysed using both descriptive- and inferential statistics. Findings: Based on the analysed data, it was found that creativity is one of the key attributes, if not the most important, to ensure continued business success in the South African retail industry. The results indicate that participants were creative, but not at the required levels. It was further established that there was no growth in the creativity levels of the participants from their first- to third year of studies, thus indicating that the required outcome of creativity, as stipulated in the qualification criteria, was not achieved. Recommendations: It is recommended that further research should be conducted in an attempt to propose a suitable creativity instrument for developing the creativity of Retail Business Management students as this would ensure that graduates are confident and able to use their creativity to address the unique challenges that the South African retail industry face.

Creativity plays a crucial role in innovation, and innovation is essential for any organization's continuous success and survival. Past creativity research focused on the studies of individual creativity (West, 2009); however, in recent years there has been an increased emphasis on understanding how a group of people work together to produce creative ideas and products (Paulus & Nijstad, 2003). This collaborative creativity process is often referred to as group creativity. Despite the increased interest in group creativity, there is still a lack of empirical studies (Taggar, 2002). This study explored the impact of group collaboration on the improvement of individual creative thinking ability. During the 2009–2010 school year, approximately 120 undergraduate technology and engineering students participated in the Innovation Boot Camp (IBC), a creativity training program. The participants were teamed up with people from different majors and asked to work together to design an innovative solution to a problem. Their individual creativity was also measured before and after the IBC using the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT). Interestingly, a significant TTCT score improvement was found only in a few groups, but not in all groups. This study qualitatively analyzed video-recorded team interactions of three groups that significantly increased their creativity scores (improved groups) and three groups who did not (non-improved groups). The findings of this analysis revealed six major differences between the improved and non-improved groups. These differences were (1) idea and information exchange, (2) critique, (3) idea improvement, (4) prototype design, (5) challenging solution, and (6) engagement level. Based on these differences, this report presents a theory that could explain how group collaboration can improve individual creative thinking ability. The implications of the study findings for future research were also discussed.

[pt] Este trabalho tem por finalidade fazer um estudo sobre a criatividade. Inicialmente, faz-se uma revisão sobre o conceito de criatividade e criatividade em matemática. Em seguida, são apresentados fatores que possivelmente influenciam no seu desenvolvimento. Por fim, são apresentadas atividades para sala de aula para favorecer o desenvolvimento da criatividade em matemática em alunos do Ensino Básico. / [en] This work aims to study creativity. Initially, there is a review of the concept of creativity and creativity in mathematics. Then, factors that possibly influence its development are presented. Finally, classroom activities are presented to encourage the development of creativity in mathematics in Basic Education students.

Those who study creativity, especially from a computational perspective, have long understood the role of social influence in the creative process. This has motivated many efforts to simulate social mechanics in artificial creative systems. However, these simulations have often replicated generic or assumed human behaviors rather than specific anthropological data. In this work we take a more focused approach by quantitatively measuring interactions between creators in online social communities and replicating observed phenomena in a simulated environment. The primary contributions of this thesis are 1) defining quantitative metrics for comparing human and simulated social networks of creators, 2) providing social interaction data and analysis for several online creative societies including Skratch, FanFiction, and r/ArtCrit, 3) defining AMACS, a flexible Architecture for Multi-Agent Creative Societies, and 4) demonstrating how manipulation of AMACS hyperparameters can induce a broad range desired behaviors, including behavior observed in human communities. This thesis will enable those who manage and participate in human creative societies, including administrators of large online communities of creators, to better understand the behavior of their community members. It will also help those seeking to simulate interactions between creative agents to identify differences between their simulations and human communities, providing points of inspiration and correction that may improve simulation efficacy.

With increased globalization, Internet connectivity, and competitive economic conditions, global organizations are increasingly recognizing the importance of effective global collaborations. Hence, there is a need to extend the use of psychological teaming strategies for domestic team-formations to also accommodate teams that are globally distributed. Previous research efforts have investigated psychological factors for design creativity and effective global collaboration; however, few have addressed these factors concurrently. The focus of this dissertation is therefore on the formation of creative design teams in a globally distributed and culturally diverse environment. This dissertation provides a theoretical foundation for teaming methodologies for globally distributed and culturally diverse teams. It also presents a new global collaborative and creative design team formation method: the Global Design Team Formation (GDTF) method. This is a novel computational method that uses potential team members' psychological and cultural traits, in an attempt to form effective teams that are psychologically and culturally cohesive. The method is based upon and merges Jung's theory with the theoretical frameworks of (a) Teamology and (b) Global Leadership and Organizational Behavior Effectiveness (GLOBE), and it provides a quantitative representation scheme combining scores from the Meyers-Briggs Test Indicator (MBTI) and the Kogut and Singh index (KS index) using the GLOBE dataset. The GDTF method has been applied to three populations. The control group consisted of 42 three-person teams in a sophomore-level mechanical engineering design course at a US university, to validate the Teamology framework, which is based on Jung's and Belbin's theories. The GDTF method was then applied to two international teaming situations: a globally team-taught course on engineering design at the senior and graduate levels with 8 globally distributed teams across the US, Germany, Mexico, and China; and 23 dyadic teams of US undergraduate students performing automotive research with German graduate students in Germany. Results of this research shows that psychologically balanced and cohesive teams provide improved design creativity, and that this performance difference can be predicted using the team members' psychological traits. Statistical analysis indicates that creativity in engineering design depends on the presence of Te, Fe, Fi, and Si psychological traits, in decreasing order of importance, within the teams. The importance of these traits remains dominant in global teams, though global diversity negatively impacts team cohesiveness and hence their effectiveness, though not their creativity. / Ph. D.

No description available.

This study was conducted to investigate the possibility that highly creative art majors possess certain unique personality characteristics that are common only to individuals who are highly creative.

The study herein reported was conducted to determine the relationships of personality and intellectual characteristics to creativity.

Creativity is widely recognised as a vital element in modern-day engineering design. It is through creative behaviour that engineering designers produce creative solutions to their problems, and through creative solutions that many companies succeed. However, research into creative behaviour within engineering design has to date focused largely on the design process in general or on early-stage design; neglecting the often complex and constrained engineering practice that occurs during later design stages. It is to this research focus that the work presented here has been completed. Defined through its production of outputs that are original, of appropriate quality, and surprising, creative design behaviour is a culmination of several aspects within the engineering process; that of a person or team; working within a specific context; actively completing a process; that will produce an output for a particular design brief. At the centre of this situation is then the designer; it is through their individual behaviours that creative outputs are formed. Due to the nature of the later stage engineering design process, the accompanying influences under which designers work, and the types of activity that they complete, it presents a very different situation to early-stage design. It is therefore not possible to assume that understanding based on study of either early-stage design or the design process in general is entirely applicable to later-stage design processes or to the type of support that designers working within may need. Thus, when linked to creative behaviour, this presents an opportunity for research; there is possibility to gain valuable understanding of the manner in which creative solutions are produced through the study of designers’ creative behaviour in later-stage design. It is to this goal that this research has been performed, namely to characterise the creative behaviour of designers within the later-stages of the engineering design process. To this end, this thesis presents a detailed review of the field of creativity, the field of engineering design, and current understanding of designer behaviour. From the understanding that each of these provides, a framework and coding scheme are then developed, which are designed to identify creative behaviour within the individual tasks of designers throughout the design process. This coding scheme is then used within three studies; one based on seven less-experienced designers working within a 22-week project, one of eighteen designers of varying experience undertaking a design brief set by the author, and one of four designers working within industry. Through analysis of the data produced by these studies, this thesis contributes several characterisations of designer behaviour within later-stage design. These include typical task-types in which all designers are creative, two distinct creative approaches that correlate with a designers personal creative style, and types of tasks to complete in order encourage streamlining of the design process; in addition to more general characterisations concerning designer focus within early and late-stage design, and differences in behaviour between expert and less-experienced designers. Through the understanding that this research has gained and presents within this thesis there are many opportunities for further work on the subject of the improvement and support of designer behaviour. Both within an academic and industrial context, detailed and specific characterisation of creative behaviour in later-stage design has the potential to provide the means to improve both the process and output of engineering design.

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the process of creativity in advertising from a practice-based perspective and illustrate the dynamics and relations between practices that can constitute this phenomenon. A nine month long ethnographic study was conducted in the context of an international advertising agency in Iran, where the organisational aim of doing being creative is in contradiction with the broader social system of the country which largely promotes conservative thinking. Such tension makes practitioners aware of their intertwinement with the practices involved in the creativity process and thus it is easier for them to reflect on what they are doing (Sandberg and Tsoukas 2011). This setting thus provides a good platform to capture the logic of practices. By drawing on Schatzki’s (1996) theories of practice, the everyday practices of creatives, their interaction with other members of their advertising agency, their clients and audiences as well as with existing advertising and ideas within the social and situational milieux from the start of a campaign until receiving approval are examined. The findings indicate various stakeholders participate in the process of creativity in advertising, such as creatives, other ad agency members, the client, the campaign’s audience, and the governmental officers, all of whom can have different requirements and preferences. While prior literature makes valuable contributions to our understanding of creativity in advertising agencies, in particular related to the important features of the creative outcome, the environmental factors that hinder or foster creativity and the people involved, particularly those individuals that are responsible for delivering creativity, their traits and personalities, we lack an understanding of its process and the recursive roles of environmental and structural factors that can shape and be shaped by the process of creativity in advertising. The present study contributes to this literature by adopting a practice lens revealing the process of creativity in advertising to be entwined in relational/socio-material practice, be the alignment of different preferences of various stakeholders, and be a cumulative process. In addition, techniques for pursuing different end tasks are explored and practices are found to be carriers of culture, and the internal and external rewards in practices are found to be the perceived competences of a practice and the embracing of the identity of a practice respectively. Finally, some managerial implications based on the outcomes of this research are proposed. These cover the establishment of practice-based guidelines with a corresponding reward system for evaluating creativity in advertising, introducing an appropriate physical layout and structures for ad agencies that can enable the alignment of various objectives and avoid potential tensions, providing a comprehensive induction and training for staff, ensuring an organisational flat structure as well as deploying collaboration as the most appropriate type of leadership for controlling creatives.