Honors Course Feature: The Business of Creativity and Innovation

One staple of the Honors College’s curriculum for the past decade has been HONR 3001, “The Business of Creativity and Innovation,” a seminar taught by Christopher Qualls, associate professor of Theatre and Dance. In recognition of this class’s longstanding popularity and widespread impact on students from majors across the university, Honors students elected Qualls in the Spring of 2025 to be the one of the college’s two professors of the year.   

What is the secret of this course’s longstanding success? Qualls, who has taught at Auburn for twenty years, cited the universality of the seminar’s topic. “Not all people identify as ‘creative,’ but navigating life is a creative act, and the more we understand the creative mind, the easier it is to approach life in a meaningful and rewarding way.”  

The course is inherently interdisciplinary, applying methods and principles from the fine arts to fields as apparently divergent as marketing and mechanical engineering, with the goal of identifying what practices historically have led to the successful creation of new ideas and approaches. “Most great innovators and artists adhere to similar principles, and those principles are transferable to any field of study,” Qualls explained. In their final work for the seminar, “students get to research topics of their own choosing, so they can personalize the projects to their own interests.” 

Citing his longstanding fascination with science fiction as an inspiration for this course, because of how this genre intertwines artistic and scientific creativity, he described the seminar as an effort to help students see common threads across many fields but then apply those principles of innovation to their own careers and lives. As students in the class examine various case studies, they develop a keener awareness of what it takes to bring what might seem to be just a fantasy or dream to fruition as a true innovation.  

Lessons in Creating

Qualls’s goals for this course matched closely with the descriptions students provided of what they took away from the seminar. “What I loved most was how the principles he taught were so universal,” noted Dalton Dismukes, a junior marketing major with minor in music business. “When we did presentations about different innovators and creators, each one was from a different industry, yet all the same principles applied, whether the innovator was in medicine, business, music.”  

Brooke Satterfield, a junior graphic design major with a minor in marketing, had particular praise for a list of “fundamental principles of creating” that Qualls has developed collaboratively with his students, adding new principles every time he teaches the course. “These aren’t just boring textbook recitations of “rules,” they are over a hundred simple, yet powerful ways to begin creation.”  

Satterfield cited an especially powerful lesson about creativity and failure. “The principle that stuck with me the most was ‘fail’…[I]t seems so frustratingly counterintuitive, but throughout the course, we researched so many examples of people failing and turning their failure into success. This rewired my understanding of failure: it is not a stopping point, merely a detour to success.” 

Connection, Creativity, and Self-Confidence

Asked what motivated him to teach this course year after year, Qualls cited his students: “In Honors, it’s fantastic to be able to work with incredibly engaged students from every discipline at Auburn.”  

Students have who have taken this seminar express equally high opinions of their professor. “He has an incredible talent for making a huge room of over a hundred students feel like a smaller, familiar space,” said Satterfield. Dismukes, citing Qualls’s infectious enthusiasm for the topic, said, “You can tell he is extremely passionate about everything he teaches in this class, and it makes the class that much more enjoyable.”  

Most of all, students highlighted this course as one that had a transformative impact on them, in their careers and their lives. As Satterfield reported, “If you’re looking for a class that will help you grow as a person, this seminar is an excellent choice.” 

Every semester the Honors newsletter features one or two courses that epitomize the Auburn Honors educational experience. No single requirement or feature defines all Honors classes. Instead, these courses, which involve almost all fields of study, share the goal of providing intellectual enrichment for the Honors College’s students, enhancing the already rigorous offerings of an Auburn curriculum. Taught through a variety of approaches, they often take advantage of smaller class sizes to utilize more active and collaborative forms of learning.