About the centre

We inspire and enable individuals and organisations to turn ideas into action through innovation, creativity and leadership.

We are building a global community of creative thinkers and practitioners who work together to lead positive change.

In working towards our vision, we value creativity, openness, collaboration, fairness, mastery and fun.

• Creativity: We value curiosity and the capacity to imagine, evolve and apply novel ideas that address challenges, generate opportunities and produce creative outcomes.
• Openness: We actively engage with different ways of thinking, feeling and behaving and we honour individual differences to make everyone feel included.
• Collaboration: We collaborate beyond disciplines, valuing communication, dissemination, participation, teamwork and co-creation.
• Fairness: We treat everyone equitably and create an environment that is free from discrimination or dishonesty so that decision-making processes
  are fair.
• Mastery: We strive for the highest standards in research, education and knowledge exchange through self-reflection, learning from each other, listening to feedback and analysing our performance.
• Fun: We value playfulness, spontaneity and new ideas so that everyone enjoys participating.

VUCA is a concept that originated with students at the U.S. Army War College to describe the Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity of the world after the Cold War. This concept has found new relevance in an environment that is increasingly complex, ill-structured, dynamic and chaotic and wherea different style of leadership is needed. Traditional management approaches are falling short in responding to the challenges we must address. The need for creativity and innovation to drive positive change can’t be ignored.

The Centre was founded in 2008 by the Vice-Chancellor Malcolm Gilles to foster interdisciplinary research and teaching across the University’s schools and departments. It sought to disrupt the established patterns of discovering new knowledge and thought leadership. Today, we are proud to continue in this tradition and enable new forms of creative thinking and leadership.