We cannot play 20 questions with creativity and innovation and win: the necessity of practice-based integrative research

Abstract

In engineering, we are concerned with addressing technical challenges with various consequences such as societal and environmental. In broader domains, we address challenges with all available means under similar constraints. The challenges are systemic with interfaces to other issues, embedded in a context that provides constraints and influences what may be a viable solution. In addressing challenges, engineers participate in transdisciplinary teams, exercising different modes of reasoning including design, creativity, system thinking, and critical thinking. These modes interact in different ways, as a complex system, leading to an emergent process that delivers the required solution. In a way, our challenges or what we, as researchers, seek to study, are ‘living things moving in a field (Editorial board of IJDCI, 2013)’. While this description is integrative, holistic, requiring multiple perspectives to study, science has progressively turned into a collection of specialized fields, wherein each, further specialization has been exercised leading to difficulties to address challenges (Reich & Shai, 2012). A primary justification for this specialization has been the explosion of knowledge and its complexity that requires deep expertise in specialized areas. But the risk that materialized is the creation of artificial boundaries between necessary elements of addressing real problems and reinforcing silos that hamper communication. The International Journal on Design Creativity and Innovation (IJDCI) had the goal to broaden the boundaries for studying creativity and innovation beyond engineering as ‘living things moving in a field’. This was reflected in the statements of several editorial board members in the 2013 editorial (Editorial board of IJDCI, 2013):