Assessing creativity: drawing from the experience of the UK's creative design educators

The aim of this paper is to respond to the acknowledged dearth of academic discourse on assessment strategies for entrepreneurship education. Using established approaches from design education as its fulcrum, it proposes a generic framework for assessment of “creativity” in an entrepreneurial context.

This primarily constructivist investigation is considered in the context of recent UK discussions, empirical evidence, literature reviews and government policies. It includes the UK's Quality Assurance Agency – Benchmark Statement for the UK's creative industries and maps the approaches onto entrepreneurship education.

As assessment of ideas generation, innovation and opportunity recognition are, “Central to developing and learning entrepreneurial behaviours”. There are clear parallels between the pedagogic approaches from “design” disciplines and the learning outcomes advocated in generic curriculum development “for” entrepreneurship.

Business school approaches and their associated challenges dominate the entrepreneurship research agenda. Interdisciplinary research, in particular collaborations between the Business and the Creative disciplines, offers opportunities for constructive alignment.

With no intention of “reinventing the wheel”, more adapting and refining it, the paper's primary intention is to offer a springboard of thought from which creative capacity in enterprise education might be enhanced and assessed.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate surrounding issues of assessment and offers insights into established approaches that have evolved beyond the traditional enterprise education environment, one where credit‐bearing curricula have managed and assessed the creative process effectively.