Engineering Creativity: The Influence of General Knowledge and Thinking Heuristics

This Chapter is devoted to consideration of importance of general knowledge in engineering creativity. It discusses the definition of engineering creativity, the importance of professional knowledge as well as knowledge outside the profession (general knowledge) and the role played in idea generation by expert schemae. It discusses the outcomes of idea generation experiments with Substance-Field Analysis that involved undergraduate engineering students and presents data on the experiments conducted at two universities in Italy with postgraduate students. The results of this study suggest the need to incorporate the component of 'general knowledge' into the model of creativity developed by Amabile (1983) in order to make this model suitable for the engineering profession of the twenty-first century.