Embracing Creativity in Business Education with GenAI Tools

Previous studies have demonstrated the strong link between creativity skills and business education (Dewett and Gruys, 2007; Penaluna, A. and Penaluna, K., 2009; Homayoun and Henriksen, 2018). Noticeably, the major attempts to use different Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools to enhance student creativity skills concentrate on arts and science subjects (Li et al., 2024; Wood and Moss, 2024). However, there have been few voices from educators in the field of business management who have applied GenAI to develop creativity in solving business problems. This paper presents a case study of applying GenAI to strengthen students’ creativity skills in business education. The context lies in the Creative Problem Solving(CPS) module at level 5, which is designed for students to develop their creativity skills purposed to enhance their business competence. Based on examining teaching materials from the BA Business Programme and BA Business with Marketing Programme Level 5 CPS Module, this paper focuses on developing creativity skills for business undergraduate students, especially their abilities to adopt GenAI tools to assist their professional business capabilities. Given that the learning outcome of the module is to evidence the development of creativity skills and problem-solving skills through the reflection of ‘self’ with utilisations of appropriate theoretical frameworks and digital tools, GenAI tools were introduced to enhance the students’ creativity skills in the development of business concept as well as the design of the digital story. Notably, the core concept adopted in CPS Module is the Six Stages of CPS process design by Osborn and Parnes (Parnes, 1992; Proctor, 2018), featuring Objective Finding, Fact Finding, Problem Finding, Idea Finding, Solution Finding and Acceptance Finding stages. GenAI tools were introduced, and the CPS theoretical framework was taught. Along with the teaching of the first three stages, GenAI tools including ChatGPT, Copilot and Perplexity were introduced to assist the students for their research on the background information and existing solutions as well as the definition of the problems. During Stage Four Idea Finding, Claude and TextFX were introduced to support students to generate sufficient number of ideas as potential solutions to the problem. Following that, during Stage Five and Stage Six, Character.ai and Luma AI were introduced to facilitate the needs from the students to conduct critical evaluations of the ideas generated as well as to create a digital story with a reflection of ‘self’ within the CPS process. Observations from the teaching showed that, overall, more than 90% of students were interested in learning and using GenAI tools to assist the development of their academic and professional skills. In particular, comparing the result from academic year 2022-23 with academic year 2023-24, the issue on attainment gap among top performing students has been resolved. However, nearly 50% of students felt it was challenging to use the GenAI tools in their production of the digital story, as they were not entirely sure where would be the best place in their digital story production to utilise the GenAI tools. Therefore, future recommendation is to not only include GenAI tools but also to introduce more digital tools with embedded AI functions to suit the learning needs of students and the real-life scenarios of their future career. It is also intended to introduce digital tools to share the learning experience of students on their use of AI tools. Further efforts include combining business start-up experience and employability-related training resources together with GenAI to simulate real-world scenarios where students must apply their creative problem-solving skills in their aspired career pathways.

References:

Dewett, T., & Gruys, M. L. (2007). Advancing the case for creativity through graduate business education. Thinking Skills and Creativity, 2(2), 85-95.

Homayoun, S., & Henriksen, D. (2018). Creativity in business education: A review of creative self-belief theories and arts-based methods. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 4(4), 55.

Li, H., Wang, Y., Luo, S., & Huang, C. (2024). The influence of GenAI on the effectiveness of argumentative writing in higher education: evidence from a quasi-experimental study in China. Journal of Asian Public Policy, 1-26.

Proctor, T. (2018) Creative problem solving for managers: Developing skills for decision making and innovation. 4th Edition. Routledge: New York.

Parnes, S.J. (1992) Source Book for Creative Problem Solving, Buffalo: Creative Foundation Press

Penaluna, A., & Penaluna, K. (2009). Creativity in business/business in creativity: transdisciplinary curricula as an enabling strategy in enterprise education. Industry and Higher Education, 23(3), 209-219.

Wood, D., & Moss, S. H. (2024). Evaluating the impact of students' generative AI use in educational contexts. Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching & Learning, 17(2), 152-167.