There is rising awareness within government, educators and parents about the importance of equipping India’s generation next with creativity and innovation skills to enable them to succeed in the 21st century VUCA world, writes Ramiya Sakthivel, Cynthia John & Mini P. Even if belatedly, there is rising awareness within government, educators and parents about the importance of equipping India’s generation next — the largest child and youth population worldwide — with creativity and innovation skills to enable them to succeed in the 21st century VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) world. Gerard Puccio, chair, International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State University (USA), defines creativity as “the ability to see new opportunities, to produce original ideas, to flexibly adapt to changing situations, and apply one’s imagination to solve complex problems”. The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, released in July 2020 by the Union education ministry after an interregnum of 34 years, accords high importance to developing children’s creativity and critical thinking skills in the country’s 1.5 million primary-secondary schools. Throughout the 63-page document, the policy exhorts educators from preschool to higher education to fashion “learning environments which promote creativity” to deliver “holistic and multi-disciplinary education”. With Planet Earth, aka Gaia, confronted with unprecedented global existential dangers — climate change, rampaging pandemics, persistently high inflation, wide income inequality and high unemployment among other challenges — there’s an emerging global consensus that school and higher education systems around the world need to be redesigned and re-engineered to teach creativity and encourage innovative thinking from earliest age. The Washington-based Partnership for 21st Century Learning (estb.2002), an “advocacy organisation focused on infusing 21st century skills into education”, highlights “creativity and innovation” as vital 21st century skills. More recently, the Davos-based World Economic Forum in its The Future of Jobs Report 2025 unambiguously stresses that “creativity, originality and initiative” are the most important skills that need to be developed. Likewise, the US-based Forbes magazine also includes creativity in its list of ‘Top 10 Most In-Demand Skills for The Next 10 Years’. “Creativity will be one of the most desirable skills in future workplaces, especially as we hand routine tasks over to machines. Creative thinking, like coming up with new ideas, problem-solving, imagining beyond the status quo, and implementing ideas to fix issues and make things better, will be critical in workplaces of the future,” writes Bernard Marr, author of Future Skills: The 20 Skills and Competencies Everyone Needs to Succeed in a Digital World in Forbes (August 22, 2022). Dipankar Das, CEO of Dugong Rising, an NGO committed to making the Andaman & Nicobar Islands climate change resilient through innovative solutions, concurs. A child prodigy who began making toys from mud when he was a class I student, Das won the Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam IGNITE Award 2015 for innovating several products including a solar pulse thresher, deep freeze device for fishermen and a lightweight water portable headload for women. “Creativity is the most important skill to succeed in workplaces of the future.…
