Creativity in cost and management accounting education: A literature review

Abstract

Humankind's creativity contributed to and improved music, arts, and scientific developments. Humankind's knowledge, experience, and life quality can be increased with creativity. Creativity increases the opportunities in accounting besides the other occupations in every aspect. Creativity is (and should be) at the center of the educational system for sustainable development. Human beings have traded and produced since ancient times. Trade transactions must be collected, classified, recorded, controlled, and summarized i.e. accounting. Therefore, accounting has become a necessity rather than a fancy choice. Today, even small companies make hundreds and thousands of daily transactions, which requires employing many accountants and consumption for accounting. Accounting activities require processing millions of transactions which require better accounting capabilities and creativity. The success of economic life, financial market, governmental organization, and companies relies on accounting information's correctness, reliability, and relevance. Processing, analyzing, preparing, and using information for decisions related to the future can be called cost and management accounting. Nevertheless, processing costs and management accounting information are complex, and the certainty and predictability are less. The necessity of creativity in accounting education, accounting process, making decisions, and control became prominent. Accounting students and graduates work in a highly complex environment where they have to benefit from science, technology, improvement, and creativity. Accounting processes are required: the ability to collect correct and relevant information (documents), classify these documents, record them, analyze them, make decisions and send feedback, which requires an additional high degree of creativity. Future accountants, business people, and teachers must be more creative and use more creative teaching methods. Today and in the future, accountants and accounting teachers have to be able to improve and adapt more creative teaching methods. So accounting teachers must focus on improving innovative (be creative) teaching methods: examining the teaching methods, philosophes content, and the whole teaching process. Reviewing the literature might lead several accounting bodies to develop and improve more creative accounting teaching methods.

Keywords: Creativity, Teaching, Accounting Education, Teaching Methods, Incentives of Accounting Education