Author: Mario Miqueles

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What Is Design Thinking and How to Use It in Higher Education

design thinking

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Tim Brown (IDEO) · Stanford d.school · Valcke et al. · McLaughlin et al. · Liesa-Orús · Elías Villanueva · Keywords: design thinking higher education · design thinking for educators · human-centered design · user-centered methodology · educational innovation · problem solving · empathy · prototyping · 21st-century skills

Over the past fifteen years, Design Thinking has moved from being a methodology exclusive to design and innovation firms to becoming one of the most discussed pedagogical approaches in the academic world. Universities such as Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and dozens of Latin American institutions have integrated it into their curricula as a tool for developing critical thinking, creativity, and complex problem-solving skills in their students.

But what exactly is Design Thinking? How does it differ from other active learning methodologies? What does the research say about its impact in the university classroom? And how can an educator begin using it without having to redesign an entire program?

This article answers those questions with rigor and with concrete applications.

What Is Design Thinking: Definition and Origins

Design Thinking is a human-centered innovation methodology that uses tools and processes from the field of design to address complex, ill-defined, or open-ended problems. It is not exclusive to the design field: today it is applied in business, healthcare, education, public policy, and any context where novel solutions that genuinely respond to people’s real needs are required.

The most widely cited definition in the academic literature comes from Tim Brown, then CEO of IDEO, who in a landmark article published in the Harvard Business Review in 2008 described Design Thinking as “a methodology that imbues the full spectrum of innovation activities with a human-centered design ethos. Innovation is powered by a thorough understanding, through direct observation, of what people want and need in their lives” (Brown, 2008). More directly: it is a method that places real human needs — not assumptions about those needs — at the center of every innovation process.

The institutional origins of modern Design Thinking trace back to the 1990s, when David Kelley, founder of IDEO, began articulating and systematizing the design process as a methodology transferable to other fields. Kelley later co-founded the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford (known as the d.school), which became the world’s leading center for Design Thinking education and research, and whose five-stage process model is today the most widely used in university programs around the globe.

Why Design Thinking Matters for Higher Education

Contemporary higher education faces a tension that few institutions have managed to resolve: graduates must be capable of navigating complex, ambiguous, and rapidly changing problems, yet most university programs continue training them primarily to answer questions whose answers are already known.

McLaughlin et al. (2022), in a study published in PLOS ONE involving 19 faculty members and 196 students across 23 courses at four universities in the United States, describe Design Thinking as “an iterative, human-centered approach to problem solving that synthesizes what is desirable, equitable, technologically feasible, and sustainable.” The authors note that as universities expand their efforts to train students with Design Thinking mindsets and skills, it is essential to evaluate practices and outcomes in order to better understand how DT is experienced in the classroom.

Their research identified three DT practices characteristic of university-level teaching and five consistent learning outcomes: improved problem solving, greater empathy, capacity for collaborative work, creative thinking, and a disposition toward iteration. These outcomes align directly with the competencies that employers most consistently identify as lacking in university graduates.

The systematic review by Elías Villanueva (2025), published in the Revista de Ciencias y Artes and based on the PRISMA protocol with searches in Web of Science and Scopus, confirms that Design Thinking “fosters creativity and problem solving, drives peer collaboration, innovation, and the digital competencies that are so critical today.” The study is especially relevant for the Latin American context because it reviews literature published in both Spanish and English, with inclusion criteria that explicitly address the university educational context of the region.

The Process: The Five Stages of Design Thinking

The most widely used model for teaching and applying Design Thinking is the one developed by Stanford’s d.school, which organizes the process into five non-linear, iterative stages. It is essential to understand that these are not mandatory sequential steps but modes of thinking that a team can move through, repeat, and combine according to the needs of the problem.

Stage 1 — Empathize

The first stage involves gaining a deep understanding of the people for whom the solution is being designed. This means direct observation, interviews, immersion in the user’s context, and the active suspension of one’s own assumptions and biases.

In the university classroom, this stage is typically the most transformative for students. Most academic programs train students to analyze problems from the outside. The empathy stage of Design Thinking asks something different: to go out and observe and listen to the people affected by the problem before proposing any solution. This shift in stance — from the expert who knows to the observer who learns — is, in itself, a competency worth developing.

Stage 2 — Define

The second stage involves synthesizing the findings from the empathy phase to formulate a point of view: a clear, user-centered statement that captures the essence of the real problem to be solved.

This stage introduces one of Design Thinking’s most valuable contributions to education: the distinction between the stated problem and the real problem. When teams skip empathy and jump straight to defining the problem from their desks, they are almost always solving the wrong problem. The define stage requires that the problem formulation be grounded in empirical evidence gathered directly from the people involved.

Stage 3 — Ideate

The third stage is idea generation. Here the team uses divergent thinking tools — brainstorming, SCAMPER, the Six Thinking Hats, among others — to produce the greatest possible number of potential solutions without judgment or prior filtering. The fundamental rule is to defer evaluation: quantity first, quality later.

In the university context, this stage requires the instructor to actively manage the tension between creative freedom and methodological discipline. Students trained in systems that penalize error tend to self-censor at this point, proposing only “safe” ideas. Ideation in Design Thinking requires a psychologically safe environment where error is treated as information, not as failure.

Stage 4 — Prototype

The fourth stage involves building rapid, inexpensive, and tangible representations of the most promising ideas generated in the previous phase. A prototype is not the final product: it is a thinking tool, an artifact that makes an idea visible so that it can be discussed, evaluated, and improved.

This principle — thinking with your hands, not just with your head — is one of the most countercultural for traditional university education, where thinking takes place almost exclusively through text and argumentation. A prototype in Design Thinking can be a sketch, a paper model, a mock-up, a storyboard, or even a role-play scenario. What matters is not its aesthetic quality but its capacity to generate learning through interaction.

Stage 5 — Test

The fifth stage involves putting the prototype in front of real users to gather feedback and learn. The goal is not to validate the idea but to question the assumptions underlying it. Each testing cycle produces information that feeds back into all previous stages: it may reveal that the prototype needs modification, that the problem was poorly defined, or that more empirical information needs to be gathered during the empathy phase.

This iterative logic — design, test, learn, iterate — is radically different from the traditional academic logic of a single submission and terminal evaluation. Its incorporation into the university classroom introduces, in a practical way, the idea that knowledge is provisional, that solutions improve through cycles of feedback, and that early failure is preferable to late failure.

The Evidence: What Research Says About Its Impact

The most relevant question for a university educator is not whether Design Thinking is interesting, but whether it produces measurable, replicable learning outcomes. The available evidence is encouraging.

The study by Valcke et al. (2023), published in the International Journal of Technology and Design Education (Springer), is one of the most robust in the literature on Design Thinking in higher education. It involved 910 university students from different disciplines, working in teams throughout a semester in a course where they analyzed real problems and proposed solutions using Design Thinking. Data were collected at three points during the semester and evaluated from three simultaneous perspectives: student self-evaluation, peer evaluation, and evaluation by the facilitating instructor.

The study’s abstract reports:

“Results show a significant improvement on students’ problem solving and creativity skills, according to the three raters. Effect sizes were also calculated; in all cases the effect sizes from t0 to t1 were larger than t1 to t2. The multi-actor perspective of this study, the adoption of reliable and valid measures and the large sample size provide robust evidence that supports the implementation of design thinking in higher education curriculum for promoting key skills such as problem solving and creativity, demanded by labor markets.”

The triple evaluator perspective — student, peer, and instructor — and the sample size (910 students) make this study a particularly solid reference. All three types of evaluators consistently recorded significant improvements, substantially reducing the risk of bias.

Liesa-Orús (2020), in an article published in the Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa (REDIE) at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, analyzed the perceptions of 107 university students who participated in a Design Thinking experience aimed at designing educational innovation projects. The study’s abstract states:

“Los resultados indican que los equipos de trabajo lograron diseñar planteamientos innovadores a problemáticas reales de su entorno comprometiéndose activamente en el proceso compartido de búsqueda de soluciones. Esta metodología activa supone un impulso a la confianza de los estudiantes en sus capacidades creativas y desarrollo de las habilidades empáticas.”

[The results indicate that the work teams managed to design innovative approaches to real problems in their environment, actively engaging in the shared process of finding solutions. This active methodology represents a boost to students’ confidence in their creative capacities and development of empathic skills.]

This finding about creative confidence is especially significant: it is not merely that students learn to use a tool, but that they develop a belief in their own capacity to generate novel solutions. That confidence — which David Kelley and Tom Kelley call creative confidence in their book of the same name — is one of the most durable and transferable learning outcomes of Design Thinking.

Design Thinking in the Latin American Context: Barriers and Opportunities

Research on Design Thinking in Latin American higher education is more recent than its English-language counterpart, but it is growing significantly. Solis Chuquiyauri et al. (2025), in an article published in the journal Universidad y Sociedad, analyzed the implementation of Design Thinking in universities in Ecuador, Peru, and Mexico, identifying both its potential and its main obstacles.

The study notes that in Latin America, Design Thinking faces specific challenges: institutional resistance to change, a lack of teacher training in active methodologies, and the structural barriers of rigid curricula designed for content transmission rather than competency development. However, it also documents that where it has been implemented with adequate institutional support and teacher training, the results in terms of problem solving and strengthening of key skills are comparable to those reported in English-speaking contexts.

The Valcke et al. (2023) study was notably conducted from Ghent University (Belgium) in collaboration with ESPOL (Ecuador), making it one of the few high-rigor studies with direct Latin American institutional participation. Its results are, in that sense, particularly relevant for regional contexts.

How to Implement Design Thinking in the University Classroom: A Practical Model

The most practical question is how to begin. Implementing Design Thinking does not require a complete program redesign: it can be introduced progressively through bounded projects.

Level 1 — Focused introduction (2 to 4 weeks)

The instructor selects a real problem from the subject’s knowledge area and asks students to work through the five stages of the process in small teams. The problem can be as concrete as “How might we improve the first-year student experience in our department?” or as broad as “How might we design a more accessible healthcare service for elderly people in rural areas?” What matters is that it involves real users whom the teams can observe and interview.

At this level, the instructor acts as a process facilitator, not as an expert on the solution. Their role is to guide teams through the stages, ensure they do not skip the empathy phase, and prevent them from evaluating ideas during ideation.

Level 2 — Semester-long project

Design Thinking becomes the methodological backbone of a project spanning the entire semester. Teams tackle more complex problems, with multiple cycles of prototyping and testing. At this level it is possible to integrate formative assessment at each stage, cross-team feedback, and a final presentation to external audiences (community partners, companies, or institutions).

Level 3 — Course fully designed around DT

The entire course syllabus follows the logic of Design Thinking: theoretical content is introduced based on the needs that emerge from the design process, not as abstract prerequisites. This level requires greater facilitator experience from the instructor and stronger institutional support in terms of space, time, and assessment structures.

What Design Thinking Is Not: Three Common Misconceptions

The growing popularity of Design Thinking has also generated misconceptions worth addressing.

It is not just a brainstorming session. Brainstorming is a tool within the ideation phase, but Design Thinking is a complete process that begins with deep empathy and ends with rigorous testing. Using sticky notes and generating ideas without having gone through the empathy phase is not Design Thinking — it is design without empirical grounding.

It is not only for designers. This is perhaps the most widespread misconception in Latin American university contexts, where the methodology tends to be associated exclusively with graphic design, industrial design, or communications programs. Design Thinking is a problem-solving framework applicable to any discipline: medicine, law, engineering, education, social work, environmental sciences. Empathy, problem definition, and prototyping are transversal competencies.

It does not guarantee innovation. Design Thinking is a process that favors innovation by placing real human needs at the center of the design process and by creating conditions for experimentation. But it does not guarantee innovative outcomes: the quality of the process depends on the depth of the empathy, the diversity of the team, and the genuine willingness to iterate based on feedback. A poorly facilitated Design Thinking process can produce solutions just as conventional as any traditional method.

Design Thinking as a Gateway to the Specialization in Creativity

One of the most valuable characteristics of Design Thinking as a starting point for creativity training is that it combines, in a single process, several of the central theoretical elements of creativity studies: divergent thinking (ideation stage), convergent thinking (definition and selection stage), empathy as a condition for contextualized creativity (empathy stage), and prototyping as the materialization of creative thought.

For this reason, Design Thinking is the first topic of the Specialization in Creativity at the Master in Creativity — not because it is the simplest, but because it is the one that best integrates the conceptual frameworks developed throughout the entire program.

Understanding Design Thinking well — not as a five-step recipe, but as a philosophy of human-centered innovation grounded in empirical research — is the foundation on which the more advanced competencies of the specialization are built.

Conclusion: From Method to Mindset

Design Thinking is not, ultimately, a five-step process. It is a mindset: the disposition to prioritize a deep understanding of human beings over any assumption about their needs, to generate multiple possibilities before committing to a solution, and to learn through action and feedback.

The available research — from the 910-student study by Valcke et al. (2023) to the systematic review by Elías Villanueva (2025) and the multi-university faculty study by McLaughlin et al. (2022) — converges on the same finding: when Design Thinking is implemented with methodological rigor and adequate pedagogical support in the university context, it produces significant improvements in problem solving, creative thinking, empathy, and collaborative work.

Those are exactly the competencies that higher education claims to want to develop in its graduates. Design Thinking offers a concrete, evidence-based, and proven path for doing so.

References

Brown, T. (2008). Design thinking. Harvard Business Review, 86(6), 84–92. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18605031/

Elías Villanueva, L. E. (2025). Design thinking como herramienta pedagógica en educación superior: una revisión sistemática de literatura. Revista de Ciencias y Artes. https://revistasucal.com/index.php/rca/article/view/159

Liesa-Orús, M. (2020). Design thinking: creatividad y pensamiento crítico en la universidad. Revista Electrónica de Investigación Educativa, 22, e28. https://doi.org/10.24320/redie.2020.22.e28.2917

McLaughlin, J. E., Chen, E., Lake, D., et al. (2022). Design thinking teaching and learning in higher education: Experiences across four universities. PLOS ONE, 17(3), e0265902. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265902

Solis Chuquiyauri, Z., Rivera Castañeda, P. M., García Palacios, C. A., & Tejada Arana, A. A. (2025). Innovación en la enseñanza universitaria: Design Thinking para fomentar creatividad y pensamiento crítico en educación superior. Universidad y Sociedad, 17(2). https://rus.ucf.edu.cu/index.php/rus/article/view/5033

Valcke, M., Segura-Robles, A., & Parra-González, M. E. (2023). Impact of design thinking in higher education: a multi-actor perspective on problem solving and creativity. International Journal of Technology and Design Education, 33(1), 217–240. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-021-09724-z

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5 Creative Thinking Techniques Every University Educator Should Know

Reading time: 14 minutes · Key authors: Guilford · De Bono · Eberle · Osborn & Parnes · Buzan · Keywords: creative thinking techniques · creative thinking for educators · creativity tools · divergent thinking · higher education · SCAMPER · six thinking hats · mind maps · CPS · creativity in the classroom

There is a persistent gap in higher education: creativity appears in nearly every university graduate profile, but it rarely shows up in the classroom as explicit, methodological, and assessable content. It is not that educators don’t care about it. It is that the vast majority were never trained in the tools that make it teachable.

This article presents five science-backed creative thinking techniques that can be applied directly in the university classroom. These are not playful filler activities. They are tools with decades of research behind them, used in teacher training programs, design departments, business schools, and higher education programs around the world.

Each technique is described with its theoretical foundation, its internal logic, and its concrete application in the teaching context.

Why Techniques Matter: Creative Thinking Does Not Emerge Spontaneously

Before getting into the techniques themselves, it is worth understanding why they are necessary.

J. P. Guilford, in his landmark presidential address to the American Psychological Association in 1950, was the first to propose that creativity could be studied scientifically and that it involved specific, measurable cognitive abilities. His model of divergent thinking — the capacity to generate multiple original solutions to an open-ended problem — identified four fundamental dimensions: fluency (the number of ideas generated), flexibility (the variety of categories explored), originality (the statistical rarity of the ideas), and elaboration (the level of detail in developing ideas) (Guilford, 1967).

What makes Guilford’s contribution particularly relevant for teaching practice is that these dimensions are not fixed personality traits: they are cognitive skills that can be stimulated, measured, and developed through well-designed activities and environments. Miller, Cruz, and Kelley (2021), in a study published in the Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education based on interventions with undergraduate business students, conclude that “evidence suggests that creative thinking can be taught” and that their results “offer encouragement to all instructors, irrespective of any prior experience with creativity-enhancing efforts.”

Put differently: you do not need to be a creativity expert to start teaching it. You need the right tools.

Technique 1 — Divergent Thinking: The Foundation of All the Others

More than a technique, divergent thinking is a cognitive framework — but explicit training in it is the starting point of any serious creative development program. The reason is straightforward: most educational systems are designed around convergent thinking — finding the single correct answer to already-defined problems. Divergent thinking operates in the opposite direction: it generates multiple possibilities in response to open-ended problems.

Guilford (1967) demonstrated that divergent thinkers tend to be at a disadvantage in conventional intelligence tests, precisely because these tests penalize multiple answers and reward convergence. This observation has a direct pedagogical consequence: if an instructor only asks questions with one correct answer, they are systematically training convergence and blocking creativity.

How to apply it in the classroom:

The simplest tool for activating divergent thinking is the Alternate Uses Task: students are asked to generate as many uses as possible for an everyday object — a paperclip, a brick, a sheet of paper — within a limited time (5 to 10 minutes). Responses are assessed on Guilford’s four dimensions: How many ideas did they generate (fluency)? How many distinct categories did they explore (flexibility)? How many are statistically uncommon (originality)? How much detail did they provide for each idea (elaboration)?

This activity, which may seem trivial, serves a precise pedagogical function: it makes the student’s own thinking patterns visible. Those who tend to list similar uses are in the low-flexibility zone. Those who stop quickly show low fluency. The exercise does not only train — it diagnoses.

For the instructor, the key is to use these activities before introducing new course content, not as a superficial warm-up, but as a way of activating the mental disposition necessary for creative learning.

Technique 2 — The Six Thinking Hats (De Bono)

Developed by Edward de Bono and originally published in 1985, the Six Thinking Hats technique is probably the most widely used creative thinking tool in educational and corporate settings worldwide. Its logic is simple but powerful: instead of thinking about a problem simultaneously and chaotically — mixing data, emotions, criticisms, ideas, and decisions at the same time — the technique divides thinking into six distinct modes, represented by colored hats.

Each hat defines a specific cognitive role (De Bono, 2017):

  • White hat: data, facts, and verifiable figures. What information do we have? What are we missing?
  • Red hat: emotions, intuitions, and gut feelings. How does this make me feel? What does my intuition say?
  • Black hat: critical thinking and caution. What could go wrong? What are the risks?
  • Yellow hat: optimism and value. What are the benefits? Why could this work?
  • Green hat: creativity and new ideas. What alternatives exist? What solutions have we not yet explored?
  • Blue hat: metacognition and process management. What are we doing? What should we do next?

The evidence:

Kivunja (2015), in an article published in Creative Education (Scientific Research Publishing), analyzed in detail how the Six Thinking Hats model can be used as an effective pedagogy for teaching critical thinking and problem solving in the 21st century. The author concludes that “the systematic use of the Six Thinking Hats model provides a structured framework for developing not only functional thinking skills but also critical, analytical, and creative thinking.”

Elbilgahy and Alanazi (2025), in a study published in BMC Medical Education (PubMed Central), applied the technique with undergraduate nursing students and found that it provides “a framework for examining complex subjects from diverse perspectives, fostering effective critical thinking and decision-making.” Results showed significant improvements in both student opinions about the method and their critical thinking skills as measured before and after the intervention.

How to apply it in the classroom:

The most effective way to introduce the Six Thinking Hats in a university classroom is through case analysis. Students are presented with a complex case from their field of knowledge — an ethical dilemma, a design challenge, a business decision, a historical conflict — and assigned one hat per group, or asked to work through all six hats in sequence. Using the black hat before the green hat is particularly useful: identifying risks first frees students to propose ideas without feeling they are being irresponsible.

For the instructor, the technique is also valuable as an evaluation tool: the quality of a student’s thinking under the black hat (critical rigor) is easily distinguishable from their thinking under the green hat (creative breadth), which allows for much more specific feedback than a generic “good idea” or “this won’t work.”

Technique 3 — SCAMPER

SCAMPER is one of the most direct and effective ideation techniques available, particularly useful for educators because its structure allows it to be applied to virtually any disciplinary content. It is an acronym that organizes seven idea-generating questions:

S — Substitute: What components, materials, processes, or people could be replaced? C — Combine: What ideas, functions, or parts could be joined or blended together? A — Adapt: What could be adjusted, modified, or borrowed from another context? M — Modify / Magnify / Minify: What could be changed in size, shape, color, rhythm, or meaning? P — Put to other uses: How could this be used in a different way or in a different context? E — Eliminate: What could be removed, simplified, or made dispensable? R — Reverse / Rearrange: What would happen if the order, logic, or structure were inverted?

The origin and the evidence:

SCAMPER was developed by Bob Eberle, an educational administrator and member of the Creative Problem Solving Institute, who formalized the technique in his book SCAMPER: Games for Imagination Development (Eberle, 1971). Eberle was passionate about integrating creativity principles into traditional education, and his motivation in creating SCAMPER was to produce a tool that would help students access their natural creativity. The technique was built on the earlier work of Alex Osborn, the originator of brainstorming, transforming his checklist of questions into the mnemonic we know today.

The effectiveness of SCAMPER in educational contexts has been documented in multiple studies. Research with university students in biological education found that the SCAMPER technique is effective in stimulating creativity in experimental design, process skills, and investigative skills, with an average performance score of 88.50 (very good) in experimental design activities. A more recent study by Chen et al. (2025), published in Thinking Skills and Creativity (ScienceDirect), explored the integration of the CPS model with SCAMPER in the context of university interior design education, with 70 third-year students participating in a seven-week experimental program, yielding positive results both in idea generation and execution.

How to apply it in the classroom:

SCAMPER is especially powerful when applied to objects, processes, or concepts from the discipline being taught. A law instructor can ask students to apply SCAMPER to a specific legal norm. A marketing instructor can use it to redesign an existing product. A history instructor can invite students to “combine” two distinct social movements and analyze what new phenomenon would emerge.

The pedagogical key of SCAMPER is that each question activates a different cognitive mechanism. It is not just “think differently”: it is “think differently in this specific way, right now.” That concreteness is what makes it manageable for students with no prior experience in creative thinking.

Technique 4 — Mind Maps (Buzan)

Mind maps are a knowledge visualization and organization technique developed by British psychologist Tony Buzan in the 1970s. Their fundamental principle is that the brain does not process information linearly — as a list or traditional hierarchical outline — but radially and associatively: starting from a central concept, thinking branches out in multiple simultaneous directions, connecting ideas through proximity, analogy, or contrast.

According to Buzan (2006), mind maps utilize both verbal and visual elements to engage the whole brain, promoting comprehension and long-term recall — characteristics that have been confirmed in recent empirical studies.

The evidence:

The meta-analysis by Shi et al. (2022), titled Effects of mind mapping-based instruction on student cognitive learning outcomes, published in Asia Pacific Education Review (Springer), conducted a systematic review of the empirical literature on the effects of mind mapping-based instruction on students’ cognitive outcomes. The findings showed that mind mapping-based instruction produces measurable improvements in concept comprehension, knowledge organization, and problem-solving skills.

Multiple studies have explored the benefits of Buzan’s technique for teaching and learning, including information retention, thought organization, and the development of critical thinking skills such as reasoning, decision-making, and problem-solving. Notably, Ellozy and Mostafa found that the use of mind mapping strategies among first-year university students improved their critical thinking and reading comprehension skills, as well as their capacity for visualization and imagination during learning.

How to apply it in the classroom:

Mind maps have three primary uses in the university context, and all three are pedagogically valuable.

First, as a prior knowledge activation tool: before introducing a new topic, students are asked to create a mind map of everything they already know or associate with that concept. The map reveals connections the student holds but has not yet articulated, and also makes visible the conceptual gaps that the class needs to fill.

Second, as a creative synthesis tool: at the end of a unit, students are asked to create a mind map that integrates all the concepts covered, including connections they themselves perceive between elements that the syllabus did not explicitly link. This use develops integrative thinking — a core competency in creative thought.

Third, as a project planning tool: students use the map to organize the phases, resources, and potential challenges of a project before executing it. Unlike linear timelines, a mind map allows students to see the project as a whole and detect non-obvious interdependencies.

For the instructor, mind maps are also useful as a formative assessment instrument: a student’s map reveals with great precision how they organize their knowledge, what connections they make, and which conceptual nodes are poorly developed.

Technique 5 — Creative Problem Solving (CPS, Osborn-Parnes Model)

Creative Problem Solving (CPS) is probably the most rigorous and systematic model for teaching applied creativity. Originally developed by Alex Osborn in his book Applied Imagination (1953) and extended academically by Sidney Parnes and colleagues at the Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College, CPS offers a structured framework that integrates divergent and convergent thinking in a multi-stage process for solving complex problems.

CPS is a framework that individuals or groups can use to formulate problems, opportunities, or challenges; generate and analyze multiple, varied, and novel options; and plan for the effective implementation of new solutions. Today’s CPS framework builds on more than four decades of theory, research, and practical application across a variety of contexts, involving the integration of both creative and critical thinking skills.

The evidence:

The Creative Studies Project of Parnes and Noller (1972, 1973) is one of the most cited studies in the history of creativity research in education. It involved an intensive two-year sequence of undergraduate courses that included a variety of creativity models, theories, and tools. This quasi-experimental study clearly demonstrated that instruction in creative thinking benefited students in the experimental group compared to the control group: those who received creativity training outperformed the control group on measures of cognitive ability and on tests of real-life problem solving.

Puccio (in Isaksen & Treffinger, 2004) summarizes the model’s trajectory: Sidney Parnes, Ruth Noller, and their colleagues provided the academic scrutiny that confirmed that CPS works, that it can be taught, and that people can learn to improve the way they think and solve problems.

The process stages:

In its most widely used form in educational contexts, CPS comprises six stages that alternate between divergent expansion (generating many possibilities) and convergent closure (selecting the most promising ones):

  1. Objective Finding: What is the desired outcome? What do we actually want to achieve?
  2. Fact Finding: What do we know about the problem? What are we missing?
  3. Problem Finding: Which formulation of the problem best captures the real challenge? Often the stated problem is not the real problem.
  4. Idea Finding: Maximum expansion of possibilities without judgment or filtering. This is where tools such as SCAMPER or brainstorming are applied.
  5. Solution Finding: Critical analysis of the generated ideas, applying explicit criteria to select the most viable.
  6. Acceptance Finding: How is it implemented? Who does what, when, and with what resources?

How to apply it in the classroom:

CPS is ideal for project-based work spanning several weeks. The instructor acts as a process facilitator: not providing answers, but guiding teams through the stages — making sure they do not prematurely collapse divergent thinking (the most common error: evaluating ideas before enough have been generated), or get stuck in the generation stage without reaching decisions.

A particularly effective application in higher education is to ask teams to identify a real problem from their environment — social, institutional, or from their disciplinary field — and work through all the CPS stages, producing as a final deliverable not only a solution, but full documentation of the entire creative process.

How to Integrate These Techniques Without Overloading the Syllabus

A legitimate question is: how can five new techniques be incorporated without sacrificing the disciplinary content of the course?

The answer is that these techniques do not compete with content — they enhance it. A mind map of the central concepts of a topic is simultaneously a creative learning activity and a deep study strategy. A SCAMPER exercise applied to a course case study develops both creative thinking and analytical understanding of the case. The Six Thinking Hats applied to an ethical dilemma in the field teaches the technique while deepening the content analysis.

The most efficient integration follows a progression logic:

In a first stage, divergent thinking (Technique 1) serves as an initial activation, making students aware of their own cognitive patterns. In a second stage, mind maps (Technique 4) develop the capacity for synthesis and conceptual connection. In a third stage, SCAMPER (Technique 3) and the Six Thinking Hats (Technique 2) introduce more complex structures for idea generation and evaluation. In a final stage, CPS (Technique 5) integrates everything in a complete process of creative real-world problem solving.

This progression can be distributed across a semester without requiring more than 15 to 20 minutes per session for the creative activities.

Why the Instructor Is the Most Important Variable

No technique works on its own. Its effectiveness depends on how the instructor introduces it, facilitates it, and integrates it into assessment.

Miller et al. (2021) are explicit on this point: simply including creative activities in the syllabus without explicit reflection on the process does not produce the same results as doing so with pedagogical intentionality. Students need to know why they are doing what they are doing, what cognitive skills they are developing, and how those skills relate to the content and competencies of the course.

This requires instructors to develop what we might call creative literacy: a foundational knowledge of the theoretical frameworks of creativity, the available tools, and the pedagogical design principles that allow them to be integrated coherently.

That literacy is not acquired by reading one article. It is acquired through systematic training.

Conclusion: Five Tools, One Common Principle

The five techniques presented in this article share a fundamental characteristic: they all operate on the structure of thinking, not on its content. They do not tell you what to think. They tell you how to think more creatively.

Guilford’s divergent thinking trains the quantity and variety of ideas. De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats organize modes of thinking to avoid chaotic, one-dimensional thought. SCAMPER provides idea-generating questions that break the inertia of habitual thinking. Buzan’s mind maps activate the capacity for visual synthesis and connection between ideas. And Osborn and Parnes’s CPS integrates everything into a rigorous process that moves from problem to solution.

Used progressively and with pedagogical intentionality, these five techniques can transform how students approach the problems of their discipline — and transform, along the way, how instructors design their classes.

References

De Bono, E. (2017). Six thinking hats. Penguin UK.

Eberle, B. (1971). SCAMPER: Games for imagination development. D.O.K. Publishers.

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Can Creativity Be Taught? What Science Says and How to Apply It in the Classroom

Creativity study group

Reading time: 15 minutes · Key authors: Amabile · Csikszentmihalyi · De Bono · Scott, Leritz & Mumford · Egana-delSol · Torrance · Keywords: creativity · creative thinking · creativity training · higher education · intrinsic motivation · divergent thinking · pedagogical design · cognitive skills · creativity in the classroom · creative learning

There is a question that comes up almost every time at the start of a creativity course, phrased in different ways but carrying the same underlying doubt: “Why am I here if creativity is simply something you’re born with?”

It’s an understandable question. For decades, popular culture reinforced the idea that creativity was a gift reserved for artists, inventors, and exceptional geniuses. That Mozart composed because he was Mozart, that Edison invented because he was Edison, and that the rest of us should be content with following instructions. If you weren’t born creative, tough luck.

The problem is that idea is wrong. And science has been proving it for decades.

This article brings together the most relevant evidence on teaching creativity: what researchers say, how the creative learning process works, and what all of this means for educators and professionals who want to develop this skill seriously and methodically.

The Myth of Innate Talent and Why It Persists

Before discussing what we do know, it’s worth understanding why the myth of innate talent is so persistent.

The main reason is that creativity, when observed from the outside, appears spontaneous. We see the result — the work, the solution, the brilliant idea — but we don’t see the process that preceded it: years of practice, accumulated knowledge, failures, internalized patterns. What looks like sudden inspiration is, in most cases, the product of a long and trained process.

Edward de Bono, one of the most influential theorists in the field of lateral thinking, was categorical on this point: creativity is not a mystical quality, nor a matter of natural talent or temperament, but a skill that can be cultivated and developed (De Bono, 1990). This statement, far from being an isolated opinion, is backed by decades of empirical research.

Another factor feeding the myth is the confusion between two very different types of creativity. What researchers call Big-C — the creativity of Einstein, Beethoven, or Picasso — does involve unusual combinations of talent, context, and opportunity. But so-called little-c, the everyday creativity that allows people to solve problems, generate useful ideas, and think originally at work and in life, is accessible to anyone with the right tools and environment (Amabile, 2012). And it is precisely this second form of creativity that can — and should — be taught.

The Empirical Evidence: Creativity Training Programs Work

The question of whether creativity can be taught is not new. E. Paul Torrance, creator of the world’s most widely used creative thinking test (the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking, TTCT), asked himself this same question in the 1960s and spent decades answering it empirically (Torrance & Torrance, 1973).

The most compelling evidence comes from the meta-analysis by Scott, Leritz, and Mumford (2004), published in the Creativity Research Journal. The researchers conducted a quantitative review of available creativity training programs. Their abstract describes the findings precisely:

“Based on 70 prior studies, it was found that well-designed creativity training programs typically induce gains in performance with these effects generalizing across criteria, settings, and target populations. Moreover, these effects held when internal validity considerations were taken into account. An examination of the factors contributing to the relative effectiveness of these training programs indicated that more successful programs were likely to focus on development of cognitive skills and the heuristics involved in skill application, using realistic exercises appropriate to the domain at hand.”

In other words: well-designed creativity training programs produce measurable, replicable improvements, regardless of the context, evaluation criteria, or population studied. This is not a one-off or random effect.

The same authors published a second complementary study that year (Scott, Leritz, and Mumford, 2004b), in which they analyzed 156 training programs to identify which types of intervention are most effective. They found 11 common types of training, all with some value, but highlighted idea production training and cognitive training as particularly effective. This has a direct implication for pedagogical design: not every “creative” activity produces the same results — method matters.

Amabile’s Model: The Three Components That Can Be Developed

One of the most important theoretical contributions to understanding why creativity is teachable comes from Teresa Amabile, a researcher at Harvard. In her Componential Theory of Creativity, developed since 1983 and revised in subsequent publications, she defines creativity as “the production of ideas or outcomes that are both novel and appropriate to some goal” (Amabile, 2012, p. 1).

According to this theory, creativity arises from the confluence of four components:

  1. Domain-relevant skills: the knowledge, technical skills, and experience in a specific field. These include facts, principles, problem-solving paradigms, and specialized domain techniques.
  2. Creativity-relevant processes: a cognitive style and personality characteristics conducive to independence, risk-taking, and the ability to see problems from new perspectives, as well as skills for generating ideas. They include tolerance for ambiguity, self-discipline, and the ability to break out of habitual thinking “scripts.”
  3. Intrinsic motivation: passion for the task itself — genuine interest, enjoyment, and a personal sense of challenge — above and beyond external motivators such as rewards, evaluations, or supervision.
  4. The social environment: the component external to the individual. Amabile identified that certain environmental factors actively block creativity — norms of harsh criticism of new ideas, emphasis on the status quo, excessive pressure — while others stimulate it, such as freedom in carrying out work, collaborative teams, and supervisors who support the development of new ideas.

What makes this model especially useful for education is its direct implication: all four components can be addressed. Domain knowledge is acquired through study. Creative processes are trained through deliberate practice. Intrinsic motivation can be cultivated through environments that promote autonomy and appropriate challenge. And the educational environment can be deliberately designed to stimulate rather than suppress creativity.

Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity as a System, Not an Individual Trait

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the psychologist known primarily for his concept of flow, offers another fundamental framework. For Csikszentmihalyi (1996), creativity is not just an individual mental process: it is the result of the interaction of a system composed of three elements — a culture with its rules and symbolic domains, a person who introduces novelty into that domain, and a field of experts who recognize and validate that innovation.

This systemic view has an important pedagogical consequence: creativity can be developed by working on any of its three dimensions. In the educational context, this means that designing learning conditions well — the environment, feedback, the level of challenge — is not an optional detail, but a constitutive part of the creative process itself.

His studies on flow in educational contexts further showed that students report more optimal experiences — and therefore greater creative disposition — when they face challenging tasks with immediate feedback, in environments that promote autonomy. The implication is clear: a teacher who designs working conditions well is, quite literally, fostering the creativity of their students.

Evidence in a Latin American Context: The Acciona Program in Chile

A particularly relevant study for the Spanish-speaking context is that of Egana-delSol (2023), published in npj Science of Learning (Nature), which evaluated the impact of the Acciona program in Chile — an initiative of arts workshops in public schools created in 2007 by the National Council for Culture and the Arts, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Balmaceda Arte Joven Foundation.

The study’s abstract notes that the program was designed to improve the effectiveness of formal education through the quality of artistic and cultural education, with the goal of developing students’ creative skills. The results showed positive correlations between participation in the program and academic achievement, measured levels of creativity, and peer relationships.

This study is significant for two reasons. First, because it demonstrates that the positive effects of teaching creativity are not exclusive to Anglo-Saxon educational systems: they are replicable in Latin American contexts with their own distinct characteristics. Second, because it confirms that a structured program — with clear objectives, competent professionals, and deliberate methodology — produces results that a traditional curriculum does not produce on its own.

Evidence of Creative Learning in Higher Education

González-Zamar and Abad-Segura (2019), in a systematic review published in REencuentro. Análisis de Problemas Universitarios, analyzed creativity specifically in the university context. Their abstract is direct:

“Creativity is a fundamental component of intelligence in young people for adaptation, problem solving and decision making. Fostering creativity in education allows to increase both the collaborative and autonomous and self-critical abilities of the student. […] The results demonstrate the need for an educational system where creative learning prevails.”

The authors conclude that students are creative at different levels and that the acquisition of creative competencies is key both for the individual and for their future professional integration. This review also confirms the existing gap: creativity appears mentioned in university graduate profiles, but is rarely addressed in an explicit and methodological way in the actual curriculum.

Benveniste and Creativity Training: The Scale of the Field

To put the relevance of the topic into perspective, Benveniste (2022), in an article published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, offers a global view:

“Creativity is a major source of innovation, growth, adaptability, and resilience, making it a top priority of governments, global corporations, kindergarten-through-professional educational institutions, and other organizations and individuals who collectively invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually into training in divergent thinking and related practices.”

The fact that governments, corporations, and educational institutions worldwide invest hundreds of millions of dollars annually in creativity training is not a minor detail: it reflects a broad consensus — beyond academia — that creativity is a skill that responds to deliberate intervention.

The Teacher’s Role: From Content Transmitter to Designer of Creative Environments

All of this evidence points toward a rethinking of the teaching role. Teaching creativity does not mean “inspiring” students with motivational speeches, nor giving total freedom and waiting for things to “flow.” It is rigorous work that combines theoretical knowledge, pedagogical design, and environmental management.

Research on creative teachers points to a specific profile: they are methodical and flexible at the same time, capable of clearly communicating the objectives of the learning process, of transforming information so that students engage with it from an active perspective, and of posing open-ended problems without sacrificing rigor. They are not passive facilitators waiting for something interesting to happen. They are deliberate designers of learning experiences.

This means, among other things, knowing when to provide structure and when to give freedom, how to evaluate creative processes without falling into subjectivity, and how to sustain students’ intrinsic motivation over time. According to Amabile’s model (2012), the environment a teacher creates — including the type of feedback they provide, the degree of autonomy they allow, and their attitude toward error — can both stimulate and suppress creativity, regardless of the students’ talent.

Creativity Blockers That the Educational System Perpetuates

Understanding that creativity is teachable also means recognizing what blocks it. Several of the most common obstacles are not individual but systemic.

Fear of failure is probably the most powerful. An environment that penalizes mistakes — through punitive grades, comparisons, or unconstructive criticism — trains students to avoid risk. And risk avoidance is incompatible with creative thinking. Amabile (2012) identified that norms of harsh criticism of new ideas are one of the environmental factors that most consistently suppress creativity in organizational and educational contexts.

Overvaluing the single correct answer is another major obstacle. Many educational systems are designed to find the “right” answer to problems that already have a known solution. Creative thinking, on the other hand, requires exactly the opposite: the ability to generate multiple possible responses to open-ended problems, to question assumptions, and to reframe the problem itself. Scott et al. (2004) found that the most effective training programs are precisely those that work these cognitive processes explicitly.

The absence of deliberate practice is the third obstacle. Like any complex skill, creativity does not develop through sporadic exposure. It requires sustained practice, feedback, and time. A one-day workshop or an inspirational talk has limited and transient effects. What the research shows is that programs that produce lasting change are those that include realistic exercises, appropriate to the domain, with repeated practice of the cognitive processes involved (Scott et al., 2004).

How Long Does It Take to Become More Creative?

A practical question that inevitably arises is how long it takes to develop creativity in a meaningful way. The honest answer is: it depends on the starting point, the method, and consistency. But research offers useful benchmarks.

The meta-analysis by Scott et al. (2004) found measurable improvements in training programs ranging from a few weeks to several months, with the most effective being those that integrated realistic practical exercises with discussion of the underlying cognitive processes. This does not mean that after that time a person becomes a creative genius, but that their capacities for generating original ideas, thinking flexibly, and seeing non-obvious connections increase in a statistically significant way.

What does become clear, both from Amabile’s componential theory and from program effectiveness studies, is that episodic training has limited effects. Creativity develops like any other complex skill: with deliberate practice, feedback, and enough time for new thinking patterns to consolidate.

What This Means for Educators and Professionals

If creativity can be taught — and the accumulated evidence indicates it can — then there are concrete consequences for both those who teach and those who want to develop this skill in themselves.

For educators, it means that creativity can no longer remain a vague curriculum objective. It requires intentional design: clear goals, structured activities, specific techniques, coherent evaluation criteria, and a classroom environment that allows for error, experimentation, and reflection. González-Zamar and Abad-Segura (2019) are explicit in noting that the gap between the declared importance of creativity in university study plans and its actual presence in the classroom is one of the most pressing problems in contemporary higher education.

For professionals who want to develop their own creativity, the implication is equally direct: it is not about waiting for inspiration or “unlocking” something supposedly lying dormant. It is about acquiring knowledge in the domain of interest, practicing creative thinking techniques regularly, and creating the conditions — of time, concentration, and appropriate challenge — for the process to occur in a sustained way.

In both cases, the starting point is the same: understanding that creativity is a skill, not a gift. And skills, by definition, are learned.

Conclusion: The Question Is Not Whether It Can Be Taught, but How to Do It Well

The question of whether creativity can be taught has an answer in the research. The meta-analysis by Scott et al. (2004) across 70 studies, Amabile’s componential theory (2012), Csikszentmihalyi’s systemic framework (1996), the results of the Acciona program in Chile (Egana-delSol, 2023), and the systematic review by González-Zamar and Abad-Segura (2019) all point in the same direction: creativity is a complex but developable skill, one that responds to training, improves with deliberate practice, and depends greatly on the conditions of the environment.

The relevant question now is a different one: how do we teach it well?

That requires method. It requires knowing the theoretical frameworks that explain how creative thinking works. It requires mastering the techniques that stimulate it. It requires understanding which conditions favor and which block the creative process. And it requires the willingness to apply all of this rigorously, whether in the classroom, in the work team, or in one’s own personal learning process.

That is exactly what a serious creativity training program should offer: not inspiration, but method.

References

Amabile, T. M. (2012). Componential theory of creativity (Working Paper No. 12-096). Harvard Business School. https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/12-096.pdf

Benveniste, M. (2022). A new method for training creativity: Narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1512(1), 29–47. https://doi.org/10.1111/nyas.14763

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1996). Creativity: Flow and the psychology of discovery and invention. HarperCollins.

De Bono, E. (1990). Lateral thinking: A textbook of creativity. Penguin Books.

Egana-delSol, P. (2023). The impacts of a high-school art-based program on academic achievements, creativity, and creative behaviors. npj Science of Learning, 8, 39. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41539-023-00187-6

González-Zamar, M.-D., & Abad-Segura, E. (2019). Evidencias del aprendizaje creativo en la educación superior. REencuentro. Análisis de Problemas Universitarios, 30(77), 111–132. https://www.redalyc.org/journal/340/34065218007/html/

Scott, G., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2004a). The effectiveness of creativity training: A quantitative review. Creativity Research Journal, 16(4), 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1080/10400410409534549

Scott, G., Leritz, L. E., & Mumford, M. D. (2004b). Types of creativity training: Approaches and their effectiveness. The Journal of Creative Behavior, 38(3), 149–179. https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2162-6057.2004.tb01238.x
Torrance, E. P., & Torrance, J. P. (1973). Is creativity teachable? Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation.