Carsten Deckert
"Anleitung zum
Uninnovativsein"
I just presented a paper at the SEFI2020-Conference in Enschede which I wrote together with Ahmed Mohya on the topic of engineering creativity. The title of the paper is "Creativity without Innovation? - Teaching Creative Problem Solving to Prospective Engineers". The paper also appeared in the Proceedings of the conference. Here is the abstract:
Engineering can be understood as a sub-category of creative problem solving with a focus on functionality. Engineers are often expected to come up with and implement new and better solutions in a company. The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, it gives an overview of the status quo of how creative problem solving is taught at German tertiary institutions (universities and universities of applied sciences). As a result, only a weak reflexive examination of creativity could be detected and only sparse teaching of creativity techniques seems to take place. Secondly, the paper discusses first experiences of teaching creative problem solving in engineering and presents some tentative results on preferences and effectiveness of creativity techniques. The results are derived from a master course with a practical part in which student had to redesign an everyday object using amongst others a range of creativity techniques.