Lead organisation:  University of Leeds (Dr Stephen Dobson – Lecturer in Creativity and Enterprise)

Partner 2:  Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST)

Partner 3:  Hoa Sen University (Dr. Nguyen Minh Anh – Chair, Department of Liberal Education | Director, Center for Service-learning)

Partner 4:  University of Transport and Communication (UTC)

The project is entitled: Innovation and enterprise mentoring network to support the role of universities in the Vietnamese creative industry and involves the development of a mentoring network which will facilitate collaborative research and staff exchanges, between the partners, to create 1) enterprise ecosystem toolkit; 2) online collaborative environment for co-authored research; 3) expansion of staff T2T course and a distance learning course for students from both the sciences and liberal arts. The project will support the partner institutions in a sustainable manner to strengthen the role of critical thinking, creativity and idea-generation processes underpinning the Vietnamese creative economy.

By focussing on creative industries the totality of economic activity stemming from creativity, innovation and culture, including their commercial forms, may be better understood (British Council 2017).  UNCTAD notes in its report that ‘the creative economy has become a topical issue of the international economic and development agenda, calling for informed policy responses in both developed and developing countries’ (UN 2008).  

It is important however to view the creative economy in holistic terms and consider the role of creativity and innovation across all forms of knowledge enterprise – cultural, arts, digital, engineering product development, and service orientated. This represents an interdisciplinary perspective on the value of creativity, critical thinking, design thinking, problem solving and idea development which, we argue here, needs to underpin teaching in Higher Education to best achieve academic impact in this area. In this sense we explore the potential to use creativity and innovation as a means to form a common language of approaches so as to enable the innovators of the future, whether from the sciences or the arts, to collaborate and drive a strong and sustainable creative economy.

In this respect, students should be encouraged to problem-solve when faced with a challenge within and between disciplines in the academy. Instead of being taught to reiterate what was learned, students may learn to develop their ability to find a multitude of solutions to a problem (i.e. divergent thinking) (Bernhard 2013).  Across the liberal arts and engineering, Project-Based Learning has emerged as an increasingly valuable means to support creativity in education (Dym et al 2005) – something which is seen as increasingly important over the last 20 years by policy makers (Craft and Jeffrey 2008).  

“Creativity and innovation can play an important role in the knowledge society, as the fruitful interdisciplinary debate presented in this report demonstrates. Creativity is conceptualised as a skill for all. It is an ability that everyone can develop and it can therefore be fostered or, likewise, inhibited. Educational actors have the power to unlock the creative and innovative potential” (Craft and Jeffrey 2008) 

Of the numerous approaches to fostering creativity in education, we explore here the role of the ‘end product’ approach in academia. The end-product approach sees creativity as a process that results in a product/output or indeed community/societal activity or impact. Ferrari et al (2009) consider that this understanding of creativity as a product is evident in design, visual arts, music, an indeed the sciences – in the “creative industries” – where manufactured goods are perceived as the result of a creative process (see also Albert & Runco, 1990; Sternberg, 1999).