Why the skills needed tomorrow cannot wait

We live in a world that no longer rewards certainty. The professional landscape today’s students will work in in the future will be shaped by forces we can barely predict today – artificial intelligence is rewriting entire industries; climate disruption is reshaping supply chains and social contracts; geopolitical volatility is unsettling markets; and technological convergence is blurring the boundaries between disciplines.

In this context, the question every graduate, organisation and policymaker urgently needs to answer is: what skills are needed to flourish in this landscape?

At the University of Malta’s Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking and Innovation, this is not an abstract question but a way of doing things. Maltese psychologist Edward de Bono, after whom the institute is named, and who is internationally renowned for his work on lateral thinking, always believed that thinking is a skill that can be taught, practised and developed.

The institute’s Master in Creativity and Innovation is configured to navigate and challenge modern day complexities. It brings together five domains that are highly sought-after in the modern workplace and that collectively are empowering and transformative: creativity, innovation management, futures studies, critical thinking and entrepreneurship. These are not simply ‘useful’ competencies to have, they are ‘transversal’; in order words, applicable across sectors, scalable across careers and lasting across time.

Creativity is a discipline, not a talent

A persistent and damaging myth is that one needs to be an artist, inventor or eccentric to have creativity. But decades of research have thoroughly dismantled this assumption.

Creativity, properly understood, is a systematic skill that can be used to generate new and appropriate responses to real-world challenges – whether in engineering firms or hospital wards, in policy offices or primary classrooms, and in start-ups as well as centuries-old family businesses.

Our institute’s graduates learn not only to think creatively themselves, but to build the conditions in which others can do so. It is an organisational capability that is fast becoming a competitive necessity.

Critical thinking is not merely a cognitive virtue, it is a civic necessity

Innovation management: from idea to impact

Generating ideas is one thing, but navigating them through institutions, markets, teams  and resource constraints is another matter entirely. The graveyard of brilliant ideas that never become reality is vast, and the failure is rarely one of imagination, it is one of implementation.

Our master’s innovation management strand equips graduates with the frameworks, tools and strategic sensibility to move from concept to consequence. Whether they are working in established organisations seeking renewal or emerging ventures seeking traction, they learn to manage the inherently uncertain, iterative and human-centred process that genuine innovation demands.

Futures studies: the art of intelligent anticipation

Our master’s programme does not train graduates how to predict the future. What we do is something more valuable: we help students develop skills needed to think rigorously and imaginatively about multiple futures, to identify emerging signals, to construct plausible scenarios, and to make decisions that remain robust across multiple possible trajectories.

Futures literacy is increasingly recognised as a core competency to navigate complex systems. It is indispensable in various sectors ranging from public policy to financial services, from healthcare to urban planning, and it remains chronically under-represented in traditional postgraduate curricula.

Critical thinking: the foundation that holds everything together.

It is possible to be creative, innovative, entrepreneurial and forward-looking and still be wrong, easily misled or prone to poor judgement. Critical thinking is the discipline that prevents this. It is the skill used to evaluate evidence rigorously, to identify assumptions and biases, and to hold competing ideas in productive tension without collapsing too quickly into premature conclusions.

In an era saturated with misinformation, algorithmic filtering and persuasive technology, critical thinking is not merely a cognitive virtue, it is a civic necessity. Our graduates leave with the habits of mind to question what they are told, including what we tell them.

Entrepreneurship: turning vision into value

In our programme’s entrepreneurial strand, we do not train graduates to launch start-ups, though many will. We cultivate in them an ‘entre-

preneurial mindset’ – the disposition to identify opportunity, to act under uncertainty, to learn rapidly from failure  and to build something of value where nothing existed before. These qualities are as relevant in large public-sector organisations as they are in emerging enterprises.

Why now?

Our Master in Creativity and Innovation is a programme for people who sense that the world is changing faster than their current toolkit can accommodate. It is for leaders who want to build organisations capable of genuine renewal. It is for thinkers who want rigorous frameworks, not empty inspiration. And it is for anyone who has ever looked at the way things are currently done, and knows they could be done differently.

Applications for the master’s October 2026 intake are now open and can be explored on the University of Malta website.

Margaret Mangion is associate professor and director of the Edward de Bono Institute for Creative Thinking and Innovation at the University of Malta. For more information, e-mail instituteofthinking@um.edu.mt or call 2340 2434.