Creativity

Creativity (or creativeness) is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. An alternative, more everyday conception of creativity is that it is simply the act of making something new. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.

Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident," "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humour. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, science and engineering.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques. This mysterious phenomenon, though undeniably important and constantly visible, seems to lie tantalizingly beyond the grasp of scientific investigation.

"Creativity, it has been said, consists largely of re-arranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know." George Keller

Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for his creative works

Definitions of creativity

"The problem of creativity is beset with mysticism, confused definitions, value judgments, psychoanalytic admonitions, and the crushing weight of philosophical speculation dating from ancient times." Albert Rothenberg

More than 60 different definitions of creativity can be found in the psychological literature, and it is beyond the scope of this article to list them all. The etymological root of the word in English and most other European languages comes from the Latin creatus, literally "to have grown."

Perhaps the most widespread conception of creativity in the scholarly literature is that creativity is manifested in the production of a creative work (for example, a new work of art or a scientific hypothesis) that is both novel and useful. Colloquial definitions of creativity are typically descriptive of activity that results in producing or bringing about something partly or wholly new; in investing an existing object with new properties or characteristics; in imagining new possibilities that were not conceived of before; and in seeing or performing something in a manner different from what was thought possible or normal previously.

A useful distinction has been made by Rhodes between the creative person, the creative product, the creative process, and the creative 'press' or environment. Each of these factors are usually present in creative activity. This has been elaborated by Johnson, who suggested that creative activity may exhibit several dimensions including sensitivity to problems on the part of the creative agent, originality, ingenuity, unusualness, usefulness, and appropriateness in relation to the creative product, and intellectual leadership on the part of the creative agent.

Boden noted that it is important to distinguish between ideas which are psychologically creative (which are novel to the individual mind which had the idea), and those which are historically creative (which are novel with respect to the whole of human history). Drawing on ideas from artificial intelligence, she defines psychologically creative ideas as those which cannot be produced by the same set of generative rules as other, familiar ideas.

Often implied in the notion of creativity is a concomitant presence of inspiration, cognitive leaps, or intuitive insight as a part of creative thought and action. Pop psychology sometimes associates creativity with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking.

Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas — then discard the useless ones.

History of the term and the concept

The way in which different societies have formulated the concept of creativity has changed throughout history, as has the term creativity itself.

The ancient Greeks, who believed that the muses were the source of all inspiration, actually had no terms corresponding to "to create" or "creator." The expression "poiein" ("to make") sufficed. The sole exception was poetry: the poet was seen as making new things — bringing to life a new world — while the artist merely imitated. In Rome, this Greek view was modified, and Horace wrote that not only poets but painters were entitled to the privilege of daring whatever they wished. Unlike Greek, Latin had a term for "creating" ("creatio") and for "creator," and had two expressions for "to make" — "facere" and "creare".

Although neither the Greeks nor the Romans had any words that directly corresponded to the word creativity, their art, architecture, music, inventions, and discoveries provide numerous examples of what we would today describe as creative works. At the time, the concept of genius probably came closest to describing the creative talents bringing forth these works.

A fundamental change came in the Christian period: "creatio" came to designate God's act of "creation from nothing". "Creatio" thus took on a different meaning than "facere" ("to make"), and ceased to apply to human functions. The ancient view that art is not a domain of creativity persisted in this period. Another shift occurred in more modern times. Renaissance men had a sense of their own independence, freedom and creativity, and sought to give voice to this sense of independence and creativity. Baltasar Gracián (1601-1658) wrote: "Art is the completion of nature, as it were a second Creator...". By the 18th century and the Age of Enlightenment, the concept of creativity was appearing more often in art theory, and was linked with the concept of imagination.

The Western view of creativity can be contrasted with the Eastern view. For the Hindus, Confucius, Taoists and Buddhists, creation was at most a kind of discovery or mimicry, and the idea of creation from "nothing" had no place in these philosophies and religions.

In the 19th century, not only was art regarded as creativity, but it alone was so regarded. When later, at the turn of the 20th century, there began to be discussion of creativity in the sciences (e.g., Jan Łukasiewicz, 1878-1956) and in nature (e.g., Henri Bergson), this was generally taken as the transference to the sciences of concepts proper to art.

The formal starting point of the scientific study of creativity is sometimes considered to be J. P. Guilford's address to the American Psychological Association in 1950, which helped to popularize the topic. Since then (and indeed, before then), researchers from a variety of fields have studied the nature of creativity from a scientific point of view. Others have taken a more pragmatic approach, teaching practical creativity techniques. Three of the best-known are Alex Osborn's brainstorming techniques (1950s to present), Genrikh Altshuller's Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), (1950s to present); and Edward de Bono's lateral thinking, (1960s to present).

Creativity in psychology & cognitive science

The study of the mental representations and processes underlying creative thought belongs to the domains of psychology and cognitive science.

A psychodynamic approach to understanding creativity was proposed by Sigmund Freud, who suggested that creativity arises as a result of frustrated desires for fame, fortune, and love, with the energy that was previously tied up in frustration and emotional tension in the neurosis being sublimated into creative activity. Freud later retracted this view.

Graham Wallas, in his work Art of Thought, published in 1926, presented one of the first models of the creative process. In the Wallas stage model, creative insights and illuminations may be explained by a process consisting of 5 stages:

(i) preparation (preparatory work on a problem that focuses the individual's mind on the problem and explores the problem's dimensions),

(ii) incubation (where the problem is internalized into the subconscious mind and nothing appears externally to be happening),

(iii) intimation (the creative person gets a 'feeling' that a solution is on its way),

(iv) illumination or insight (where the creative idea bursts forth from its subconscious processing into conscious awareness); and

(v) verification (where the idea is consciously verified, elaborated, and then applied).

In numerous publications, Wallas' model is just treated as four stages, with "intimation" seen as a sub-stage. There has been some empirical research looking at whether, as the concept of "incubation" in Wallas' model implies, a period of interruption or rest from a problem may aid creative problem-solving. Ward lists various hypotheses that have been advanced to explain why incubation may aid creative problem-solving, and notes how some empirical evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that incubation aids creative problem-solving in that it enables "forgetting" of misleading clues. Absence of incubation may lead the problem solver to become fixated on inappropriate strategies of solving the problem. This work disputes the earlier hypothesis that creative solutions to problems arise mysteriously from the unconscious mind while the conscious mind is occupied on other tasks.

Wallas considered creativity to be a legacy of the evolutionary process, which allowed humans to quickly adapt to rapidly changing environments. Simonton provides an updated perspective on this view in his book, Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity.

Guilford performed important work in the field of creativity, drawing a distinction between convergent and divergent production (commonly renamed convergent and divergent thinking). Convergent thinking involves aiming for a single, correct solution to a problem, whereas divergent thinking involves creative generation of multiple answers to a set problem. Divergent thinking is sometimes used as a synonym for creativity in psychology literature. Other researchers have occasionally used the terms flexible thinking or fluid intelligence, which are roughly similar to (but not synonymous with) creativity.

In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler lists three types of creative individual - the Artist, the Sage and the Jester. Believers in this trinity hold all three elements necessary in business and can identify them all in "truly creative" companies as well. Koestler introduced the concept of bisociation - that creativity arises as a result of the intersection of two quite different frames of reference.

In 1992 Finke et al. proposed the 'Geneplore' model, in which creativity takes place in two phases: a generative phase, where an individual constructs mental representations called preinventive structures, and an exploratory phase where those structures are used to come up with creative ideas. Weisberg argued, by contrast, that creativity only involves ordinary cognitive processes yielding extraordinary results.

The frontal lobe (shown in blue) is thought to play an important role in creativity

Neurology of creativity

The neurology of creativity has been discussed by Fred Balzac in an article on "Exploring the Brain's Role in Creativity".

The study found that creative innovation requires "coactivation and communication between regions of the brain that ordinarily are not strongly connected". Highly creative people who excel at creative innovation tend to differ from others in three ways: they have a high level of specialized knowledge, they are capable of divergent thinking mediated by the frontal lobe, and they are able to modulate neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine in their frontal lobe. Thus, the frontal lobe appears to be the part of the cortex that is most important for creativity. The study also explored the links between creativity and sleep, mood and addiction disorders, and depression.

Creativity and madness

A study by the psychologist J. Philippe Rushton found that creativity correlated with intelligence and psychoticism. Additionally, a different study found that creativity is greater in schizotypal individuals than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals. While divergent thinking was associated with bilateral activation of the prefrontal cortex, schizotypal individuals were found to have much greater activation of their right prefrontal cortex. This study hypothesizes that these individuals are better at accessing both hemispheres, allowing them to make novel associations at a faster rate. In agreement with this hypothesis, ambidexterity is also associated with schizotypal and schizophrenic individuals. Creativity has also been associated with bipolar disorder.

Creativity in various contexts

Creativity has been studied from a variety of perspectives and is important in numerous contexts. Most of these approaches are unidisciplinary, and it is therefore difficult to form a coherent overall view. The following sections examine some of the areas in which creativity is seen as being important.

Henry Moore's Reclining Figure

Creativity in art & literature

Most people associate creativity with the fields of art and literature. In these fields, originality is considered to be a sufficient condition for creativity, unlike other fields where both originality and appropriateness are necessary.

Within the different modes of artistic expression, one can postulate a continuum extending from "interpretation" to "innovation". Established artistic movements and genres pull practitioners to the "interpretation" end of the scale, whereas original thinkers strive towards the "innovation" pole. Note that we conventionally expect some "creative" people (dancers, actors, orchestral members, etc.) to perform (interpret) while allowing others (writers, painters, composers, etc.) more freedom to express the new and the different.

The word "creativity" conveys an implication of constructing novelty without relying on any existing constituent components (ex nihilo - compare creationism). Contrast alternative theories, for example:

• artistic inspiration, which provides the transmission of visions from divine sources such as the Muses; a taste of the Divine. Compare with invention.

• artistic evolution, which stresses obeying established ("classical") rules and imitating or appropriating to produce subtly different but unshockingly understandable work. Compare with crafts.

In the art practice and theory of Davor Dzalto, human creativity is taken as a basic feature of both the personal existence of human being and art production.

Creative industries & services

Today, creativity forms the core activity of a growing section of the global economy — the so-called "creative industries" — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services. The Creative Industries Mapping Document 2001 provides an overview of the creative industries in the UK.

Creativity in other professions

Isaac Newton's law of gravity is popularly attributed to a creative leap he experienced when observing a falling apple.

Creativity is also seen as being increasingly important in a variety of other professions. Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. These fields explicitly value creativity, and journals such as Design Studies have published many studies on creativity and creative problem solving.

Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton shows how some of the major scientific advances of the 20th century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come.

Accounting has also been associated with creativity with the popular euphemism creative accounting. Although this term often implies unethical practices, Amabile has suggested that even this profession can benefit from the (ethical) application of creative thinking.

Creativity and innovation

In many cases in the context of examining creativity in organizations, it is useful to explicitly distinguish between creativity and innovation.

In such cases, the term innovation is often used to refer to the entire process by which an organization generates creative new ideas and converts them into novel, useful and viable commercial products, services, and business practices, while the term creativity is reserved to apply specifically to the generation of novel ideas by individuals, as a necessary step within the innovation process.

For example, Amabile et al. suggest that while innovation "begins with creative ideas,"

". . . creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second".

Creativity in organizations

Amabile argued that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed: Expertise (technical, procedural & intellectual knowledge), Creative thinking skills (how flexibly and imaginatively people approach problems), and Motivation (especially intrinsic motivation). Nonaka, who examined several successful Japanese companies, similarly saw creativity and knowledge creation as being important to the success of organizations. In particular, he emphasized the role that tacit knowledge has to play in the creative process.

Economic views of creativity

In the early 20th century, Joseph Schumpeter introduced the economic theory of creative destruction, to describe the way in which old ways of doing things are endogenously destroyed and replaced by the new.

Creativity is also seen by economists such as Paul Romer as an important element in the recombination of elements to produce new technologies and products and, consequently, economic growth. Creativity leads to capital, and creative products are protected by intellectual property laws.

Creativity is also an important aspect to understanding Entrepreneurship.

The creative class is seen by some to be an important driver of modern economies. In his 2002 book, The Rise of the Creative Class, economist Richard Florida popularized the notion that regions with high concentrations of creative professionals such as hi-tech workers, artists, musicians, and creative people such as gay men and a group he describes as "high bohemians", tend to have a higher level of economic development.

Measuring creativity

Creativity Quotient

Several attempts have been made to develop a creativity quotient of an individual similar to the Intelligence quotient (IQ), however these have been unsuccessful. Most measures of creativity are dependent on the personal judgement of the tester, so a standardized measure is difficult to develop.

Psychometric approach

J. P. Guilford's group, developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. They involved simple tests of divergent thinking and other problem-solving skills, which were scored on:

• Fluency. The total number of interpretable, meaningful, and relevant ideas generated in response to the stimulus.
• Flexibility. The number of different categories of relevant responses.
• Originality. The statistical rarity of the responses among the test subjects.
• Elaboration. The amount of detail in the responses.

Social-personality approach

Some researchers have taken a social-personality approach to the measurement of creativity. In these studies, personality traits such as independence of judgement, self-confidence, attraction to complexity, aesthetic orientation and risk-taking are used as measures of the creativity of individuals. Other researchers have related creativity to the trait, openness to experience.

Other approaches to measurement

Genrich Altshuller in the 1950s introduced approaching creativity as an exact science with TRIZ and a Level-of-Invention measure.

The creativity of thousands of Japanese, expressed in terms of their problem-solving and problem-recognizing capabilities, has been measured in Japanese firms.

Fostering creativity

Daniel Pink, in his 2005 book A Whole New Mind, repeating arguments posed throughout the 20th century, argues that we are entering a new age where creativity is becoming increasingly important. In this conceptual age, we will need to foster and encourage right-directed thinking (representing creativity and emotion) over left-directed thinking (representing logical, analytical thought).

Nickerson provides a summary of the various creativity techniques that have been proposed. These include approaches that have been developed by both academia and industry:

1. Establishing purpose and intention
2. Building basic skills
3. Encouraging acquisitions of domain-specific knowledge
4. Stimulating and rewarding curiosity and exploration
5. Building motivation, especially internal motivation
6. Encouraging confidence and a willingness to take risks
7. Focusing on mastery and self-competition
8. Promoting supportable beliefs about creativity
9. Providing opportunities for choice and discovery
10. Developing self-management (metacognitive skills)
11. Teaching techniques and strategies for facilitating creative performance
12. Providing balance

Some see the conventional system of schooling as "stifling" of creativity and attempt (particularly in the pre-school/kindergarten and early school years) to provide a creativity-friendly, rich, imagination-fostering environment for young children. Compare Waldorf School.

A growing number of pop psychologists are making money off the idea that one can learn to become more "creative". Several different researchers have proposed approaches to prop up this idea, ranging from psychological-cognitive, such as:

• Osborn-Parnes Creative problem solving
• Synectics;
• Purdue Creative Thinking Program;

and

• lateral thinking (courtesy of Edward de Bono),

to the highly-structured, such as:

• TRIZ (the Theory of Inventive Problem-Solving);
• ARIZ (the Algorithm of Inventive Problem-Solving), both developed by the Russian scientist Genrich Altshuller; and
• Computer-Aided Morphological analysis (presented at Swedish Morphological Society).

Social attitudes to creativity

"The man who invented fire was probably burned at the stake." Ayn Rand</blockquote.>

"To be creative means to become profoundly individualized thus separating one's self from the crowd." Paul Palnik</blockquote.>

Although the benefits of creativity to society as a whole have been noted, social attitudes about this topic remain divided. The wealth of literature regarding the development of creativity and the profusion of creativity techniques indicate wide acceptance, at least among academics, that creativity is desirable.

There is, however, a dark side to creativity, in that it represents a "quest for a radical autonomy apart from the constraints of social responsibility". In other words, by encouraging creativity we are encouraging a departure from society's existing norms and values. Expectation of conformity runs contrary to the spirit of creativity. Nevertheless, employers are increasingly valuing creative skills. A report by the Business Council of Australia, for example, has called for a higher level of creativity in graduates. The ability to "think outside the box" is highly sought after. However, the above-mentioned paradox may well imply that firms pay lipservice to thinking outside the box while maintaining traditional, hierarchical organization structures in which individual creativity is not rewarded.

Notes

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Albert, R.S. & Runce, M.A. (1999). "A History of Research on Creativity", in ed. Sternberg, R.J.: Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521576040. 
• Amabile, T.M. (1998). How to kill creativity. Harvard Business Review 76 (5).
• Amabile, T.M. (1996). Creativity in context. Westview Press. ISBN 0813330343. .
• Amabile, T. M., R. Conti, H. Coon, et al. (1996). Assessing the work environment for creativity. Academy of Management Review 39 (5): 1154-1184.
• Anderson, J.R. (2005). Cognitive psychology and its implications. Worth Publishers. ISBN 0716701103. 
• Balzac, Fred (2006). Exploring the Brain's Role in Creativity. NeuroPsychiatry Reviews 7 (5): pp. 1, 19-20.
• BCA (2006). New Concepts in Innovation: The Keys to a Growing Australia. Business Council of Australia. 
• Boden, M.A. (2004). The Creative Mind: Myths And Mechanisms. Routledge. ISBN 0465014518. 
• Dorst, K. and Cross, N. (2001). Creativity in the design process: co-evolution of problem–solution. Design Studies 22 (5): 425-437.
• Feldman, D.H. (1999). "The Development of Creativity", in ed. Sternberg, R.J.: Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521576040. 
• Finke, R. and Ward, T.B. & Smith, S.M. (1996). Creative cognition: Theory, research, and applications. MIT Press. ISBN 0262560968. 
• Florida, R. (2003). The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. Basic Books. ISBN 0465024777. 
• Guilford, J.P. (1971). The Nature of Human Intelligence. McGraw-Hill. ASIN B0007C4LM4. 
• Johnson, D.M. (1972). Systematic introduction to the psychology of thinking. Harper & Row. ISBN 0060433310. 
• Kraft, U. (2005). Unleashing Creativity. Scientific American Mind April: 16-23.
• Koestler, A. (1967). The Act of Creation. Macmillan. ISBN 0330244477. 
• McLaren, R.B. (1999). "Dark Side of Creativity", in ed. Runco, M.A. & Pritzker, S.R.: Encyclopedia of Creativity. Academic Press. ISBN 0122270754. 
• McCrae, R.R. (1987). Creativity, Divergent Thinking, and Openness to Experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 52 (6): 1258-1265.
• Michalko, M. (2001). Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius. Ten Speed Press. ISBN 1580083110. 
• National Academy of Engineering (2005). Educating the engineer of 2020 : adapting engineering education to the new century. National Academies Press. ISBN. 
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• Nonaka, I. (1991). The Knowledge-Creating Company. Harvard Business Review 69 (6): 96-104.
• Pink, D.H. (2005). A Whole New Mind: Moving from the information age into the conceptual age. Allen & Unwin. ISBN. 
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• Rushton, J.P. (1990). Creativity, intelligence, and psychoticism. Personality and Individual Differences 11: 1291-1298.
• Runco, M.A. (2004). Creativity. Annual Review of Psychology 55: 657-687.
• Simonton, D.K. (1999). Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity. Oxford University Press. ISBN. 
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• Tatarkiewicz, Władysław (1980). A History of Six Ideas: an Essay in Aesthetics. Translated from the Polish by Christopher Kasparek, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. ISBN. 
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• Torrance, E.P. (1974). Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking. Personnel Press. ISBN. 
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External links

• Creativity Portal - Explores the multi-faceted world of creativity through articles and coaching modules on the creative process, inspiration, imagination, and play.
• Creativethinking.net, By Michael Michalko.
• A wiki for Creativity Techniques With a list of Creativity Techniques
• General Morphological Analysis: A General Method for Non-Quantified Modelling From the Swedish Morphological Society
• Creativity & Innovation Tube line - a novel visual representation of the creativity & innovation process
• About Fritz Zwicky From the Swedish Morphological Society
• Knowledge Machine - Online book with chapters on creativity including 1) creativity fallacies, 2) the sum of creative method, and 3) intelligence, genius, creativity, and knowledge creation
• The Creativity Force - Writings about creativity, education, democracy and more

Essays:

• The Creative Act by Marcel Duchamp. (1957)
• Metaphor and Mental Duality
• Creativity: Method or Magic?

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