Executive Summary
What the report is about
This report reviews the literature to do with creativity in rural Australia. It is about people, what they do and their landscapes and is set in the context of the institutional arrangements applying to research and development and innovation in the farm sector.

The report opens for debate the question of whether or not existing institutional arrangements constrain appreciation of the true multifunctionality of Australian rural landscapes and identifies general principles for reforming existing institutional arrangements to enable the creative expression of a wider set of beliefs and values than currently dominates innovation in agriculture and rural Australia.

Who is the report targeted at?
The report is targeted at people with an interest in innovation and creativity in rural Australia. In particular, the literature review will prove useful for managers in institutions that develop policy and oversee agricultural research and development, managers of natural resource management community and government agencies, as well as researchers and practitioners.

Background
This literature review follows on from previous work which canvasses literature and consulted experts in creativity to find a conceptual construct that could be applied to creativity for innovation in the rural sector, finally selecting a systems construct described by Gardner (1993) and Csikszentmihalyi (1996) where: ‘Creativity lies not in the head (or hand) of the artist or in the domain of practices or in the set of judges: rather, the phenomenon of creativity can only - or, at any rate, more fully - be understood as a function of interactions among these three nodes’. This systems approach to understanding creativity is encapsulated in the definition of creativity as being any act, idea or product that changes an existing set of symbols, rules and procedures (a domain) or which transforms an existing domain into a new one.

Aims and objectives
The aim of the literature review was to discover what the literature says about creativity, especially as it relates to the agricultural research and development sector.

Methods used
Relevant literature from Australia and overseas on the relationship between the nature of innovations and the innovation systems that produced them was consulted in developing the literature review.

Key findings and implications
Key findings and implications are as follows:

• The language we use narrows our thinking about rural Australia. We use the terms agriculture, farm and rural interchangeably leading to the misperceptions that all of farm is agriculture and all of rural is farm. Hence ‘problems’ are found and represented in ways that limit findings that would have been enabled by broader constructs.
• The big question posed is not whether we need both insightful and non-insightful problem finding and solution but whether our current institutional arrangements enable both.

The challenge for insightful problem solving is to see where to go whereas the challenge for non-insightful problem solving is to move successfully to a readily perceived or prescribed destination.

These problems require differing skills, logical argument being predictive of non-insightful problem solving but not of insightful problem solving. Non-insightful problem solving places demands on the solver’s ability to maintain an inner representation of the problem and the goal.

However an excessive or inflexible premature prescription of a problem may limit problem representation and therefore the power of insight for it is generally accepted that insight involves a cognitive restructuring leading to a representation of the problem.

• Innovation goals and research and development processes for rural Australia are dominated by fields of gatekeepers drawn from existing industries and, from within those industries, from cohorts of people focused, rightfully from their perspectives, on improving economic productivity within existing industries. Inevitably this leads to an emphasis on non-insightful problem seeking and solution, risk adverse processes and innovation systems designed to produce incremental gains.

Given the moderate aggregate economic performance of the agricultural sector over past decades it is questionable if this pathway alone will be sufficient to secure the future sustainability of rural landscapes and rural lifestyles.

Clearly there is a great diversity of values and of activities within the farming sector, as there is within the broader community. This diversity needs to be brought to bear on the nature of institutional arrangements for rural Australia, particularly those impacting on innovation. Given that the nature of innovation is predetermined by the design of the innovation system the way forward is to enable greater diversity in how innovation is supported and managed.
 

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