"A key role of educators is to prepare students for the future, but due to the exponential rate of change which we constantly experience, it is difficult to predict which jobs or professions will still be around when today's young people leave school."

This was argued by Professor Sandra M. Dingli and Dr Leonie Baldacchino, resident academics at The Edward de Bono Institute, University of Malta, in a paper they presented at the International Conference on Creativity and Innovation which was held in Osaka, Japan, from 10 to 12 September.

In this paper, they maintain that students need to develop their creative thinking and digital literacy skills in order to adapt to the changing requirements of the future labour market. Furthermore, they claim that most young people today are digital natives who spend hours daily on their digital devices and argue that educators could capitalise on this by using technology to foster creativity skills which are transferable to other domains and real life situations.

In addition to their paper on future skills, Professor Dingli and Dr Baldacchino conducted an interactive "foresight" workshop where participants learned how to use an idea generation technique to envision future scenarios for creativity education, joined a board meeting of the Japan Creativity Society, attended the launch of the new International Association of Creativity and Innovation and visited the Idea Marathon Institute in Tokyo.

This visit to Japan was an opportunity to share ideas with leading international scholars in the field of creativity and innovation including Professor Gerard Puccio, Professor Ikujiro Nonaka and Professor Fangqi Xu.

There was a great deal of interest in the work of the Institute on the part of conference participants, including in the part-time evening Diploma in Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, and the Master in Creativity and Innovation.

Applications for these courses are open until 30 September against the relevant application fee. For further information visit www.um.edu.mt/create or send an email on: [email protected]