**6. Conclusions**

Conjectural dimension scores are shown in Table 5 and reveal that respondents do not link the creative endeavour to its immediate applicability, while balanced tasks, clear mission received high scores. In our opinion this might reveal a dependence on clear, standardised framework, schematic thinking, which might stand against creative approach. An interesting low received organisational risk policy shows that the students do not necessary link this component to the

Proceedings of the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Studies (ICIS 2016) - Interdisciplinarity and Creativity

Equipment components were recognised as very important, with high scores, showing one more time that the students are reliant on material support for creative design, in spite of

In what concerns the creativity components, they were strongly correlated with the personal experience, in the first place, followed by interpersonal and conjectural components. The ability to question and doubt was correlated (*r* = 0.5713, *P* < 0.0001) to the experience of having a mentor in any filed and with the theoretical/ scientific knowledge (*r* = 0.3801, *P* < 0.0001). The ability to make associations was correlated with any previous experience in arts (*r* = 0.39801, *P* < 0.0001) and not being afraid to take risks is correlated at the 0.01 level (two-tailed), with the awareness of personal development goals sub-item (*r* = 0.4302, *P* < 0.0001), with the visibility of the results (*r* = 0.5608, *P* < 0.0001) and with any kind of benefit, rewarding (*r* = 0.3907, *P* < 0.0001). During the interviews, this was confirmed, as respondents linked their

Equipment Median values

Quality of the research equipment 4.43 Research premises 5.23 Access to information 5.65 Support to access materials, consumables or special equipment 4.85

Conjectural Median values

Mission clarity 4.25 Balanced tasks 5.4 Visibility of the results 4.35 Organization risk policy 2.65 Any kind of benefit, rewarding 5.27 Future usage/ applicability of the work 2.23

creativity-simulative environment.

in the Knowledge Society

170

**Table 5.** Conjectural dimension scores

**Table 6.** Equipment dimension scores

conceptualisation and initiative (Table 6).

The correlations revealed a strong liaison between creativity components showed during student group work sessions and personal, alternate experiences. This might bring, once more, the need of more flexible curriculum, where students should be able to benefit from alternative activities.

Even sophomore students and master students are strongly dependent on directions given by tutors or supervisors, and hesitate to challenge them. One of the issues in student's creative groups is the balance between the creative thinking and critical thinking within the group. The tension created at the frontier of those two is the source for advancement in solving inventive problems. Due to the lack of information on the objectives of the groups, as a whole, the critical thinking is not paid enough attention in common educational approaches and is often perceived as destructive when applied during group meetings. Overall, good communication within the team and team support were appreciated as very important but few interviewees knew how they could be accomplished. The need for efficient communication strategies activities in the curriculum might fill-in this obvious gap.

The students supervised during this research seem to perceive creative effort as a supplemen‐ tary one, somehow extracurricular, and rather few of them engage voluntarily in creative endeavours. Even if most of them agree that creativity is important, and recognise the intrinsic value creativity brings to artefacts and technologies, they are, at the beginning, reluctant to manifest components of creativity, and remain attached, for learning, expressing their contribution and examination, to standardised engineering calculus described step-by-step in design guides. This inertia is identified as an important barrier in learning with and for creativity and origins much far backwards in the education flowline. In exchange, they perceive up-to-date lab endowments as crucial for a creative design.

A general conclusion of this study is that flexible thinking, autonomous thinking and selfcriticism are the key creativity components that need to be paid special attention to in technical, scientific higher education.
