International creative tension study of university students in South Korea and Finland

Abstract

The goal of this research was to compare the creative tension of university students in South Korea and Finland at three different universities. The creative tension, or the gap between a personal vision and the current reality, was analyzed according to relevant competences in a project manager's work role. In this case, students acted as the project managers in their role of completing all the requirements of their degree. The application used for collecting and analyzing the data was Cycloid, a project manager's work role-based competence application and a model in the generic Evolute system supporting fuzzy logic applications. Data for 108 university students were collected online through self-evaluations. The application was able to identify the creative tension in each group of university students, and the results show major differences in creative tension across the universities (and also between countries). This type of in-depth analysis into the cultural perceptions of attributes offers valuable new information for academia and businesses in the assessment and improvement of multicultural understanding and cooperation in areas of mutual interest and business. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.