Teaching Creativity in a Disruptive Age: Preparing Students for Canada’s Emerging Economy
By: Michael J. McNamara
When Sheridan announced a new series of post-graduate certificates for international students, I was asked to design a course that would do more than demonstrate creativity techniques. Applications of Creativity and Innovation in Canada became my response to the turbulence reshaping both Canada’s labour market and the institutions meant to prepare people for it.
This invitation put me in a position that required some care. I have been a Professor of Creativity at Sheridan in FHASS for more than a decade. I helped design and build Sheridan’s Board Undergraduate Certificate in Creativity and I often teach those breadth electives courses, wherein we explore creativity studies in a wide and interdisciplinary way. Those courses matter, and my colleagues who teach them bring real depth and commitment. But this new post-grad context demanded something different: a more strategic, applied orientation anchored in Canada’s economic, technological, and demographic landscape. It opened an opportunity I haven’t had in a while; one that pushed me to think beyond familiar classroom practice and reflect on creativity’s place in Canada’s future, as well as the futures of the students entering it.
Working through various design concepts with ADs and colleagues, I found myself returning to bigger questions. What does creativity and innovation mean for international students arriving in Canada at this moment of transition? How do we help them understand not only creative processes, but the systems (economic, social, cultural, technological, and ecological) they are stepping into? How does creativity and innovation show up in the professions they are pursuing? And, beyond that, what role do these capacities play in Canada’s broader vision of its own future?
Those conversations were engaging and genuinely clarifying. They reinforced that situating creativity and innovation training within a distinctly Canadian context is not simply a framing device; it is a necessity. Fourth Industrial Revolution pressures, the Anthropocene, widening skills gaps, and shifting demographics make creativity, cognitive flexibility, and innovation skills central to Canada’s ability to survive and thrive in an era marked by disruption, volatility, and uncertainty.
Canadian labour-market research has been consistent on this point. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report places creative thinking and innovation skills among the top skills for 2025 and beyond. Canadian analyses, from the Future Skills Centre to RBC Economics to the Council of Canadian Innovators, echo the same messaging: automation, climate-driven restructuring, and a rapidly diversifying economy demand (and will reward) individuals who can adapt, imagine, build, and execute on creative ideas.
Designing this course ultimately gave me a clearer picture of what I could, and perhaps should, be doing at Sheridan. It highlighted how creativity and innovation, when taught intentionally and grounded in context, can help international learners integrate into the Canadian workplace, support Canada’s evolving workforce, and contribute to a more adaptive and innovative national culture. It reminds me that our role is not simply to deliver content; it is to help students see themselves as active participants in Canada’s future.
We decided to begin the course by grounding students in the realities of working in a VUCA environment (volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity) because these are not abstract concepts in Canada; they define the labour market our graduates are entering, as well as the conditions we ourselves are experiencing across post-secondary. Scenario planning helps students understand how automation, climate pressures, supply-chain disruptions, and algorithmic management reshape Canadian sectors. From there, we build the habits that matter in such conditions: creativity, cognitive flexibility, practical resilience, and self-efficacy. In this framing, creativity becomes disciplined experimentation; testing assumptions, learning from setbacks, and executing on novel ideas that hold up under real constraints.
We then extend this into a broader systems view. Biomimicry provides a way to connect creative problem-solving to the ecological and material conditions of the Anthropocene, helping students see how design choices interact with environmental limits and social impacts in Canada. The international diversity of the cohort becomes an advantage here: different heuristics, cultural frames, and problem-solving repertoires expand the “adjacent possible” of any team they join. To anchor this in the labour market, students map their skills against RBC’s job-cluster framework to understand how competencies move across sectors and why adaptability is becoming the defining feature of Canadian careers. Along the way, we surface Canada’s innovation paradox and examine how self-efficacy, team diversity, and risk-tolerant thinking shape our innovation outcomes.
At the end of the day, I was asked to design a new offering for international students; instead, with the help of colleagues across Sheridan, we set out to design something that responds to the country they are entering. I want to be clear: there is significant value in learning for its own sake. Breadth education, the classics, and wide intellectual exploration remain essential parts of a degree experience, and I continue to believe deeply in that work. But teaching outside breadth for the first time in a while also pushed me to confront a different set of questions; questions about Sheridan’s role and the opportunity we have in this moment; namely, in addition to everything we already do well, to help shore up some of Canada’s persistent innovation deficits.
I’m under no illusion that Sheridan (or any single course, least of all one I teach) can resolve Canada’s innovation challenges. But building this course prompted me to think more seriously about how we, as an institution, might give students and communities a disciplined way to understand creativity, innovation, uncertainty, ecological limits, and the labour-market forces shaping Canada’s future. The urgency of doing so is real. Skills gaps are widening, technological change is accelerating, and our innovation challenges remain stubborn. Creativity without execution won’t meet this moment, just as innovation without context won’t endure. Students who will thrive in Canada are those who can think flexibly, act ethically, and execute on novel ideas with responsibility. Sheridan has long been known for its strengths in applied creativity and experiential learning; there is an opportunity in our own moment of disruption to lean into that identity with clarity and purpose. For me, the opportunity to re-imagine this course became one small example of that larger possibility.
