Creativity Mindset: An Exploration of K-16 Edutor Leaders' and Business Leaders' Understanding and Application of Creativity to Their Professions

The study is an exploration of how Education Leaders and Business Leaders view creativity, how learning about creativity changed their awareness and perception of their own creativity, and how their changed awareness and perception of their creativity have the capacity to influence the development of creativity in their schools, classrooms and/or workplace. It is a nested case study conducted on artifacts of the participants of five sections of an online, graduate-level course on the foundations of creativity including the analysis of the participants' results on a creativity self-assessment, course exam, course discussion board posts, and the course’s capstone, creative product. The study results indicate that the Educators and the Business students enrolled hold similar perceptions of creativity and their creative strengths and weaknesses. However, emergent themes in the analyses of their Discussion Board posts demonstrated marked differences in how to the application and purpose of creativity. Specifically, the Educators focused more on intrinsic motivators that emphasized human qualities, while the Business group focused more on extrinsic motivators such as bottom line products and promotion.Ph.D., Education -- Drexel University, 201