The course work at the California Institute of Integral Studies Transformative Studies Department is all really based around this idea of creative inquiry. The idea of creative inquiry does not mean just studying something in an interesting way, although I would guess that could be a portion of it. In my thinking about it, and from reading about it as educational style, it is more of a worldview that somebody takes on and thinks about their academic scholarship.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://jacobrcampbell.com/blog/2019/09/creative-inquiry-and-the-phd/