Source: New World Encyclopedia
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.[1]
Fields such as science and engineering have, by contrast, experienced a less explicit (but arguably no less important) relation to creativity. Simonton[2] shows how some of the major scientific advances of the twentieth century can be attributed to the creativity of individuals. This ability will also be seen as increasingly important for engineers in years to come.[3]
Creativity in business
Creativity, broadly conceived, is essential to all successful business ventures. Entrepreneurs use creativity to define a market, promote a product or service, and make unconventional deals with providers, partners and lenders. Narrowly speaking, there is a growing sector of “creative industries” — capitalistically generating (generally non-tangible) wealth through the creation and exploitation of intellectual property or through the provision of creative services.[4]
Amabile[5] argues that to enhance creativity in business, three components were needed: Expertise (technical, procedural, and 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.[6] In particular, he emphasized the role that tacit knowledge has to play in the creative process.
In many cases in the context of examining creativity in organizations, it is useful to explicitly distinguish between “creativity” and “innovation.”[7]
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.”[8]
Economic views of creativity
In the early twentieth 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
[1] K. Dorst and N. Cross, “Creativity in the Design Process: Co-evolution of Problem Solving,” Design Studies, 2001, 22 (5): 425-437.
[2] D.K. Simonton, Origins of genius: Darwinian perspectives on creativity (Oxford University Press, 1999).
[3] National Academy of Engineering, Educating the Engineer of 2020: Adapting Engineering to the New Century, National Academies Press, 2005.
[4] Creative Industries Mapping Document, an overview of creative industries in the UK, 2001.
[5] T. M. Amabile, “How to Kill Creativity,” Harvard Business Review, 1998, 76 (5).
[6] I. Nonaka, “The Knowledge-Creating Company,” Harvard Business Review, 1991, 69 (6): 96-104.
[7] T. M. Amabile, R. Conti, H. Coon, et al. “Assessing the Work Environment for Creativity,” Academy of Management Review, 1996, 39 (5): 1154-1184.
[8] Ibid: 1154-1155.