Educators have indicated that creative teaching is the most important educational activity; nevertheless, most existing education systems fail to engage students in effective creative tasks. To address this issue, this study proposes a mind map based collaborative learning approach for supporting creative learning activities and enhancing students' innovative performance. An experiment has been conducted on a university management course to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed approach significantly enhanced the students' innovative performance in a project-based learning task. Such a finding not only provides evidence of the cultivability of innovative thinking, but also good references for those researchers who are interested in conducting creative learning activities. (Contains 3 tables and 5 figures.)