Creative Thinking as a Relevant Element for Industry 4.0 Professionals. A Study in Mexican University Students

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this article is to present the results of an exploratory analysis of the level of perceived achievement of the complex thinking competency in a group of engineering students in their last semester at a university in Western Mexico. Its intention is to identify whether this population has the necessary skills to be able to meet challenges and solve problems related to the demands of their future professional environments. Specifically, it seeks to identify their level in the meta-competency of creative or innovative thinking, considering it a valuable skill for Industry 4.0. Methodologically, a descriptive statistical analysis focused on arithmetic means, standard deviations, boxplot, principal components and biplot has been performed. In conclusion, and from the results, it is possible to appreciate that sufficient data were found to confirm that the participants show a high level of perception of creative thinking performance, making them more suitable to the contemporary challenges that Industry 4.0 implies for their professions.

KEYWORDS:

• Professional education
• educational innovation
• future of education
• complex thinking
• creative thinking

Acknowledgments

This publication is a product of the project “Community STEAM-OER-Latam” funded by Siemens Stiftung. Also, the authors wish to acknowledge the technical support of Writing Lab, Institute for the Future of Education, Tecnologico de Monterrey, Mexico, in the production of this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Tecnologico de Monterrey [Project ID # I004 - IFE001 - C2-T3 – T]; Werner Siemens-Stiftung [Community STEAM-OER-Latam].