Creativity and its realisation are vitally important to industry as identified, for example, by the Capitalizing on Complexity report undertaken by IBM. The scope of this study is to explore masters level design engineering students’ creativity in terms of personality correlation. A personality survey conducted on Innovative Design Engineering (IDE) masters students by applying the MBTI and Keirsey Temperament Sorter (KTS) to investigate individual creativity is reported.
The results reveal that intuition, which is suggested to potentially strongly link with creativity, is quite prominent among the IDE students. That extraversion is positively correlated with creativity in the engineering domain is modestly confirmed. Contrary to expectation, perceptors did not outnumber judgers. From KTS theory, although Idealists and Rationals account for a small part of the whole population, they mark exceptional appearances in IDE sample. It is reasonable to speculate that more creative potentials, which lead to better creative outcomes, exist among people who belong to those personality groups and possess certain personality traits in the design engineering fields where creativity is desired.