Enhancing creativity in engineering students

There is an increasing perception of the need for graduates of engineering to be creative thinkers and innovators. It is however, not clear how creativity can be nurtured or fostered within students or how it can be assessed. What is creativity? What blocks it and what facilitates it? What potential do students have for creative thinking and how can this be enhanced? What is the creative process and how can our understanding of this help with curriculum design? If the creative process can be described as 'preparation, generation, incubation and verification', what idea generation strategies are appropriate for engineering? In this paper a model to consider the 'creative potential' is presented in order to promote discussion about appropriate education developments that may be incorporated within or be additional to an engineering programme. Examples of two such developments are given which place the engineering student in a multidisciplinary context to enhance the potential for creative thinking.