Activating Creativity in Situations of Uncertainty: The Role of Third Spaces

Abstract

The links between creativity and innovation remain a ‘fuzzy front end’. This study aims to better understand how creativity can lead to innovation in an entrepreneurial context. The literature on entrepreneurial creativity and its links with innovation, enriched by research on the development of an entrepreneurial mindset, is being mobilized. It generates an experiential learning oriented entrepreneurship education program. The goal here is to examine whether third spaces resulting from situations of uncertainty implemented into the curriculum make it possible to activate creativity. The aim is to obtain a useful production adapted to a context, a market. A semi-structured questionnaire is administered via a reflexive essay. Moving from the idea to innovation presupposes that the capacities of the actors are activated in capabilities. The qualitative research provides feedback on the potential activation of the capacities of students as entrepreneurs. The results show that third spaces resulting from situations of uncertainty are places that generate potentially effective conversion factors. They allow the transformation of capacities into capabilities.