THE MINISTER of Sport and Community Development, Shamfa Cudjoe, speaking at the signing of an MOU between the Export Centres Co Ltd and the MIC Institute of Technology on Wednesday, fretted that while 6,000 people were enrolled in handicraft courses annually, she wasn't impressed by the number of businesses that were being established by graduates.

Ambitious craft creators having earned a certificate of participation from the Community Education Programme (CEP) would then need to enrol in its management courses to consider establishing a successful business.

But the status quo which separates the two processes might well be the better idea, emphasising separately the value of the creative process and the value of the business process.

It isn't clear that demanding that creative and business skills be co-dependent would necessarily deliver any improvement.

Ms Cudjoe's assertion that a doctor or a lawyer should pay to attend CEP classes is a misunderstanding of the value of a creative education for anyone in a traditional business role.

"Thinking outside of the box" is one of the great cliches of business thinking, but there is no magic formula for achieving it.

One path to infusing a business with creative approaches is to build the process of creation into the individual experience of employees.

Far from seeking to build barriers to professional workers, CEP should be engaging with private enterprise to offer its courses to their employees while embracing the potential for working business professionals to contribute to its entrepreneurship courses.

Google enshrined creative exploration in its business processes with its 20 per cent rule, giving employees one working day each week to explore a passion project or to engage in courses of learning not directly aligned to their day-to-day work.

Many projects that emerged from this aspect of Google's business were either not pursued or failed after introduction - the KilledbyGoogle website currently lists 285 - but Google News, Wear OS, Ad Sense and GMail, now cornerstones of the company's business model, all began as 20 per cent projects.

At the heart of the creative process is a heady mix of discovery and potential failure in the effort to create something new.

The Community Development Ministry has a valuable asset that it clearly needs to be thinking more inventively about using to stimulate critical thinking.

Learning to crochet or tie-dye might seem like an exercise that exists at some distance from building a successful business, but these techniques teach lessons that are important to entrepreneurial thinking.

Anyone learning to create something truly new must embrace the unknown, accept the serendipity of chance and learn from failed attempts.

These are critical skills that any local business must embrace and master if it hopes to truly innovate.