As we enter the third millennium, organizations have to cope with accelerating rates of change in technology and increased levels of competition on a global scale more than ever before. In order to stay competitive within this changing business environment, organizations are forced to constantly pursue new strategies to differentiate themselves from their competition, such as offering a stream of new products and services (Satzinger et al., 1999). Furthermore, there is growing recognition that an organization’s capability to deal with change, improve services and quality, cut costs, develop new products, and compete in a global market will depend upon the level of creative and innovative thinking of its workforce (Covey, 1989). In short, in order to remain competitive in an era of increasing uncertainty and market globalization, organizations must constantly be creative and innovative with their products and services. Software has been widely considered as central to all sophisticated innovations. In the age of the Internet the challenge is to identify and evaluate new ideas, processes and applications. In many of the fastest growing industries, including computer, entertainment, communications, adver-tising, logistics and finance, software has been the end product itself, or the highest value component in the end product. In other cases, software has been used to support value cre-ation and innovation processes. The growing importance of software-based innovations suggests the need to improve the creative skills of IT professionals. This need, in turn, requires an appropriate response from the IT education and training sector. Moreover, IT education and training should better nurture students’ creativity, so that they can be successful in their future roles as innovative professionals and business people. It is particularly important that IT students be given an opportunity to develop and apply creative and innovative skills to software processes and products. Given the crucial importance of creativity and innovative-ness for success in a knowledge economy, the main purpose of this article is to explore concepts about creativity and how they relate to software development by providing empirical research examples in IT education.
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