Epistemic activities and epistemic emotions: The necessary yet insufficient conditions to generate, evaluate, and select creative ideas

Abstract

In creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship education, students are driven by three questions: 1) Do I need to gather knowledge to generate, evaluate, and select creative ideas in business education? 2) How do I know what I know and the quality of my knowledge, and 3) How do I know that my ideas are creative enough? The short answers are: 1) Students need to gather information in the form of epistemic activities. Epistemic activities are needed, yet insufficient to acquire relevant knowledge to generate creative ideas. 2) Students appraise the state of their knowledge in four dimensions: Depth, usefulness, sufficiency, and validity. Epistemic emotions provide information to assess the state of knowledge. 3) Epistemic emotions play a crucial role in informing students about the originality and effectiveness of the ideas generated. Epistemic emotions are usually experienced regarding what students know and do not know in the stages of memory search and knowledge inquiry, candidate idea construction, and idea evaluation. Epistemic activities and emotions are needed to generate creative ideas in the fields of creativity, innovation, and entrepreneurship. We elaborated on the answers to these three questions, positing implications for education.