Building up a head of STEAM
Every few years, someone discovers that the arts might have something to do with the economy. This is always presented as a delightful surprise, like finding a violin in the procurement department or a poet with a glass of water on his head. (More about that in the next article, out in a few days. Bear with us.)
Anyway, all that happens is, people nod politely, maybe a conference panel is convened and a slide appears with the word “creativity” on it (centred, Helvetica bold), set tight against a jaunty colour. Somebody mentions innovation. Somebody else says “soft skills.”
All good, but of course not good enough. Art and artists belong much deeper inside the way we work, learn, organise, invent and make decisions. More crucially, art and artists are one of the ways civilisation trains its attention. And attention, just now, is in rather short supply.
The old argument was simple: science, technology, engineering and mathematics would carry us into the future. Build the STEM pipeline, train more engineers, produce more coders, increase the national supply of clever people who can make complicated machines do useful things.
All of that remains necessary, but the long-term economic wellbeing of countries, cities and organisations depends on more than technical skill and prowess in maths and the sciences. It depends increasingly on the ability to frame the right problems, imagine alternatives, communicate complexity, tolerate ambiguity, notice weak signals, build trust, make meaning, and understand the human consequences of technical power. In essence, all the competencies in which working artists excel pretty much on a daily basis.
That is where STEAM comes in. Science, technology, engineering, ARTS and mathematics. Properly understood, STEAM is not a cute acronym designed to make education policy look friendlier. It is actually a more accurate description of what success in our modern world requires. No, everyone does not need to become a working artist. Yes, everyone can benefit from some art thinking in their approach to work – and including serious, considered art education early in kids’ curricula can be beneficial to society.
The OECD gave us an important starting point in 2013 with Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education. It was a careful report, and its caution still matters. The question was a disciplined one: what does arts education actually do, and where is the evidence strong enough to make serious claims? [1]
The answer was mixed. Arts education has deep intrinsic value. It develops artistic skills and supports forms of human development that matter in their own right. Claims that arts education automatically improves maths, science or reading scores need to be handled carefully. That caution is useful as weak arguments do the arts no favours. They turn art into a servant of something else, usually something that already has more funding.
Since then, however, the evidence base has become more interesting.
The OECD has not published a neat “Part Two” of Art for Art’s Sake?, but it has moved the conversation forward. Its 2019 work on creativity and critical thinking argues that these capacities can be taught, practised and assessed in schools, across subjects, through deliberate pedagogy rather than inspirational wallpaper. [2]
Its PISA 2022 creative thinking assessment, published in 2024, is even more revealing. For the first time, PISA assessed how 15-year-olds generate, evaluate and improve original and diverse ideas. The results showed that creative thinking is related to academic performance, but cannot be reduced to it. [3]
If you consider it for the broad, strategic context it reveals, that observation is a rather large crack in the STEM-alone worldview, and argument. If excellence in maths and science automatically produced creative capacity, the PISA results would be tidier but they are not. Creativity behaves like a real human capacity: it is teachable, uneven, and contextual; connected to knowledge, but very far from identical with test performance in the usual subjects.
Would this suggest that economies do not run on knowledge alone? Could they also need, say, applied judgement? Or broader contextual awareness? Or maybe ways to consider solutions other than those that grow out of existing questions? Hey, how about imagination to, you know, come up with different questions?
A brilliant technical solution can fail because the problem was badly framed, because the users were misunderstood, the organisation could not absorb the constant change in the context, or its the story was badly told. It could land flat on its butt because the social circumstances (and consequences) were ignored, or because nobody had enough imagination to ask if something else might be a better idea. Business knows this, even when it pretends otherwise. There are any number of such stories out there.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, based on a survey of more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers, placed analytical thinking at the top of the list of core skills. No surprise there, but close behind come resilience, flexibility, agility, leadership, and social influence. Creative thinking comes fourth on the list. [6] What’s the take-away? It seems, the market is not asking for machines with degrees but for human beings who can think, adapt, work with others, and make sense under pressure.
David Deming’s research on the labour market makes the same point with admirable bluntness. Jobs requiring high levels of social interaction grew sharply as a share of the US labour market between 1980 and 2012. Math-intensive jobs with low social-skill requirements declined as a share. The strongest employment and wage growth came in roles that combined high mathematical skill with high social skill. [7] That word “combined” is doing a great deal of work here.
The future belongs less to isolated brilliance and more to productive combinations. Technical competence with social intelligence; data with judgement; engineering with design. Strategy with imagination. Importantly, science with ethics. This is not a sentimental view of the economy but what the labour market has been telling us for years and yes, art practitioners are experts at combining things to get new and valuable things.
There is another problem with the STEM-alone story. Technical skills age. David Deming and Kadeem Noray’s work on STEM careers found that graduates in technology-intensive majors such as computer science and engineering often receive high early-career returns, but those returns can decline as technologies change and specific technical skills become obsolete. [8]
Again, this is not an argument against STEM. It is an argument against treating narrow technical training as a complete economic philosophy. A society that wants long-term resilience needs people who can keep learning, recombine knowledge, move between domains, and think through problems that do not come with a manual. Given that rapid advancements in AI will very quickly (in many instances already do) do away with any advantage afforded by specialist domain knowledge, that process of ageing of skills will now be happening ever faster. I am not a mathematician, biologist, or an architect but now, with the aid of a well-tuned piece of AI, I can get answers to questions that take in those experts’ knowledge, and recombine it at at will. This already results in production of solutions that are non-obvious and potentially very valuable – and do not require all those experts to be put into the same room for an extended period of time, at considerable expense.
The useful worker, leader, founder, researcher, designer, civil servant or teacher of the future, therefore, will need technical fluency but they will also need imagination, interpretation, communication, cultural literacy, and a certain comfort with uncertainty so as to ask the right questions. Artists know something about how to somehow retain that comfort.
An artist begins without a guaranteed outcome. There may be a question, a commission, a material, an image, a line of text, a sound, an irritation, a contradiction – in any combination, and usually very sketchy. Then comes the work – attention is paid, form is tested, meaning is made, then broken, discarded, then remade. The process does not proceed in a tidy Gantt line, yet it is rarely vague. Serious artists are often among the least vague people you will meet. They may or may not like to talk about it, or be bothered to do so eloquently, but they deal in decisions, constraints, consequences, and revisions as working material, and they do it with every project they take on, day after day, year after year.
Artists - or people with artistic education and inclinations - are more than useful inside organisations. They are crucial, not least because of their ability to model a disciplined relationship with uncertainty. Being open to making something where there was previously no agreed template is now a top-level skill, for any company that wants to remain relevant in the near future. Those people, whom I have elsewhere called “socialised rebels”, are hugely valuable because they understand that the first answer is usually too obedient, too smug, too quick and easy, and that the question needs to be kept alive long enough for better material to appear. And that it will do so.
The STEAM argument has another card to play. The creative economy is no minor indulgence. OECD’s The Culture Fix reports that cultural and creative sectors accounted for an average of 7 percent of all enterprises and 2.2 percent of business-economy gross value added across OECD countries in 2018. Creative employment accounted for up to one in twenty jobs in some OECD countries and up to one in ten jobs in major cities and capital regions. [5]
Creative sectors contribute 3.1 percent of global GDP and 6.2 percent of global employment. [10] UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024 reports that creative services exports reached 1.4 trillion US dollars in 2022, while creative goods exports reached 713 billion USD. [11]
These figures should end the habit of treating culture as something societies fund after the “real” economy has been fed. Culture is part of the real economy. It produces value directly, as well as making places attractive, supporting tourism, building identity and soft power...
Even the formal measurement of innovation reflects this. The World Intellectual Property Organization’s Global Innovation Index includes “creative outputs” among its major innovation pillars, including intangible assets, creative goods and services, and online creativity. [12] The innovation world knows something that policy rhetoric often forgets: invention is cultural as well as technical. New value is created through symbols, stories, forms, experiences, brands, designs, interfaces, rituals, images, performances, communities and meanings. Can you imagine how any of these things would function, look and feel if the only inputs were of the pure, “serious”, “clear thinking” STEM variety?
Artists can help organisations change how they notice. They can disturb stale patterns of attention, and make hidden assumptions visible. They can give form to things people feel but cannot yet articulate. They can make the organisation strange to itself, which is often the first step towards seeing it honestly. This is why we put artists in places of work, and help people in those places to find their own creative muscles. None of that would be possible if we lived in a world governed purely by STEM. Luckily, we do not.
Companies routinely invest in tools, platforms, dashboards and consultants. Many of these are great and useful, and given that a company is an entity that functions on procedure and predictable repeatability, these are crucial to success. Yet a tool cannot compensate for a culture that punishes questions. A dashboard will not tell you what nobody dared to say. (Remember the reasons for the Challenger disaster?) A decent consultant’s framework can help put focus and operations in perspective but it cannot replace the internal power of imagination. The best organisations will need data, systems and technical skill, but they will also need people who are able to sense, interpret and create.
The education evidence supports this direction, provided we keep our claims honest. The Houston Arts Access Initiative, a large randomised controlled trial involving more than 10,000 students in 42 schools, found that increased arts learning reduced disciplinary infractions, improved writing achievement, increased compassion, and improved school engagement and college aspirations among elementary students. [13] These are not small things. They are part of the human infrastructure of learning.
The National Academies’ report Branches from the Same Tree argues for integrating the humanities and arts with sciences, engineering and medicine in higher education, precisely because modern graduates need to communicate, think critically, solve problems, lead and participate in democratic life. [14] Meanwhile, reviews of STEAM research warn that the field still needs clearer definitions, stronger assessment and less obsession with shiny final products. [15]
Good, let us have that discipline – STEAM should not become another managerial magic word. The “A” has to mean serious artistic and cultural practice, not an activity plugged into a robotics class as an afterthought. It should mean observation, working with ambiguity, material intelligence, craft, metaphor, and disciplined experimentation. It should mean giving people the experience of making, not merely the instruction to “be creative.”
Japan is often brought into this conversation as a cautionary tale: the country that, famously, squeezed arts education in pursuit of technical excellence. The reality is more finely grained. The yutori reforms of the 1990s to early 2000s reduced curriculum time across several areas, including visual arts, while introducing more integrated study and a five-day school week. Japanese art education scholars identified the reduction of school hours as a serious problem for compulsory art education, but the same policy period also reduced time for science and mathematics, which makes the simple “arts out, STEM in” version too neat for comfort.
The more useful lesson is about blunt narrowing of curriculum – and about demonstrating just how difficult education policy at a national level really is. Once a school system starts treating time for imagination, making, expression and deep subject work as adjustable ballast, the losses may appear years later, in places the timetable committee never thought to look. [16], [17]
There is a further twist. Recent Japanese research has linked reductions in junior-high science and mathematics hours to later declines in research and development capacity, including patent and publication indicators. That finding does not weaken the STEAM argument but rather strengthens it. A country cannot cut technical learning and expect technical leadership to survive; nor can it compress artistic and expressive learning and expect creativity, judgement and cultural confidence to appear on command. Japan’s more recent education reforms speak the language of creativity, problem-solving, expression and active learning, while Japanese STEAM research continues to ask what the “A” should actually mean in practice. The point is not to raid one part of the curriculum to rescue another but to build the kind of education, and the kind of working culture, in which technical intelligence and creative intelligence develop together. [17], [18]. Tellingly, Japan participated in the PISA study above, but not in the creative thinking section. This non-participation means we lack a direct international measure of whether its high STEM performance is matched by creative-thinking strength. I guess time will tell.
The case for STEAM is therefore a case for national resilience, organisational intelligence and human dignity at work. It is a case for economies that can adapt without becoming brittle, innovate without becoming inhuman, and compete without draining the life out of the people doing the competing. Art can help us rehearse possible worlds, experience other minds and see how context matters, that beauty has force, and that attention can be trained.
The future of work will be full of machines that produce plausible answers – this makes the human questions more important, not less. What is worth asking? What is worth building? Who is included? What kind of life does this create? What kind of society does this reward? What kind of person does this workplace require people to become?
STEM can help answer some of those questions. STEAM gives us a better chance of asking them properly, more broadly, and with a mind that is happy to not know.
So yes, of course, we need more STEAM. A proper head of it. Enough to remind business, education and policy that the future will not be built by technical competence alone but created by people who can think, notice, and imagine with skill. That has been our argument all along.
Sources at the feet:
[1] Ellen Winner, Thalia R. Goldstein and Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin, Art for Art’s Sake? The Impact of Arts Education, OECD, 2013. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2013/06/art-for-art-s-sake_g1g21e09.html
[2] Stéphan Vincent-Lancrin et al., Fostering Students’ Creativity and Critical Thinking: What it Means in School, OECD, 2019. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2019/10/fostering-students-creativity-and-critical-thinking_3ffa73e4.html
[3] OECD, PISA 2022 Results, Volume III: Creative Minds, Creative Schools, 2024. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2022-results-volume-iii_765ee8c2-en.html
[4] OECD, Creative Minds in Action: Students’ Imagination and Ideas in Storytelling, Design and Problem Solving Tasks on the PISA Test, 2025. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/creative-minds-in-action_5b718eb2-en.html
[5] OECD, The Culture Fix: Creative People, Places and Industries, 2022. https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/the-culture-fix_991bb520-en.html
[6] World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025, 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/3-skills-outlook/
[7] David J. Deming, “The Growing Importance of Social Skills in the Labor Market,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2017. https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/qjecon/v132y2017i4p1593-1640..html
[8] David J. Deming and Kadeem Noray, “Earnings Dynamics, Changing Job Skills, and STEM Careers,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2020. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/60832ecef615231cedd30911/t/60871f691664f41cb424b379/1619468137800/DemingNoray_STEM.pdf
[9] Fabian Stephany and Ole Teutloff, “What is the Price of a Skill? The Value of Complementarity,” Research Policy, 2024. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733323001828
[10] UNESCO, Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity: Addressing Culture as a Global Public Good, 2022. https://www.unesco.org/reports/reshaping-creativity/2022/en
[11] UNCTAD, Creative Economy Outlook 2024, 2024. https://unctad.org/publication/creative-economy-outlook-2024
[12] World Intellectual Property Organization, Global Innovation Index 2025, 2025. https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/global-innovation-index-2025/en/gii-2025-results.html
[13] Daniel H. Bowen and Brian Kisida, “Investigating Causal Effects of Arts Education Experiences: Experimental Evidence from Houston’s Arts Access Initiative,” 2019. https://www.arts.gov/sites/default/files/Research-Art-Works-TAMU.pdf
[14] National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Branches from the Same Tree: The Integration of the Humanities and Arts with Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in Higher Education, 2018. https://www.nationalacademies.org/projects/PGA-BHEW-15-07/publication/24988
[15] Elaine Perignat and Jen Katz-Buonincontro, “STEAM in Practice and Research: An Integrative Literature Review,” Thinking Skills and Creativity, 2019. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1871187118302190
[16] Mitsuru Fujie, “Fine Arts Education in Japan,” Aichi University of Education. https://www.aichi-edu.ac.jp/intro/files/seika04_04_9.pdf
[17] Kazuo Nishimura, Dai Miyamoto and Tadashi Yagi, “Japan’s R&D capabilities have been decimated by reduced class hours for science and math subjects,” Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 2022. https://ideas.repec.org/a/pal/palcom/v9y2022i1d10.1057_s41599-022-01234-0.html
[18] Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, “Course of Study / Curriculum reform in Japan.” https://tsukuba.repo.nii.ac.jp/record/52426/files/JSAE_2019-1.pdf