Teaching Creativity to Business Students: How Well Are We Doing?

As calls for enhancing the ability of business students to think creatively and develop innovative goods and services have become universal, researchers in the area of creativity have expressed concerns that the U.S. educational system may not foster creative thinking. The authors’ research is based on a sample of 442 undergraduate business students enrolled in marketing classes at two different universities. Students’ creativity was assessed using a creativity scale that measured ways of thinking in six different areas. The authors compared creativity scores of different business majors in each of these six dimensions and found that contrary to earlier research findings, students in the quantitative business disciplines of accounting, finance, economics, and information systems outperformed other business majors in some categories of creative thinking. Specific recommendations are presented to include training in a greater variety of dimensions of creative thinking in the business curriculum.