Potential Originality and Effectiveness: The Dynamic Definition of Creativity

Given the central role of creativity in the future post-information society, a call for a pragmatist approach to the study of creativity is advocated, that brings as a consequence the recognition of the dynamic nature of this phenomenon. At the foundation of the proposed new theoretical framework lies the definition of creativity itself, which is turned from static to dynamic through the introduction of the concept of potential originality and effectiveness. Starting from this central definition, and through the introduction of the auxiliary definitions for focus area, creativity goal, creative agent, creative potential of an agent, creative potential of an environment, creative process, product of a creative process, creativity potential of a process, representation of the product of a creative process, and estimator, we arrive at the definitions of creative achievement and creative inconclusiveness. Although both aspects are key in the creative process, creative inconclusiveness was not part of previous definitions, but it is argued that its role is fundamental for effective education in creativity. The new definitions are shown to have full backward compatibility with the extant corpus of scientific research in creativity, as well as forward effectiveness in suggesting novel investigation approaches to support the consideration of new theoretical hypotheses.     

The initial sketch and the growth of a creative network of enterprises in early adulthood: George Bernard shaw

Research in the evolving systems approach (see Gruber and Davis, 1988; Wallace and Gruber, 1989) shows that creative people at some time early in their careers construct an initial sketch that stimulates and guides further development of their ideas. This case study of Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) will describe this aspect of his early development: finding a sense of direction, or charting the creative life, by means of an initial sketch. It will also examine the role of a network of enterprises in the organization of a creative life. In Shaw's case, an initial sketch provides content for the creative process; a network of enterprises organizes the process. Incubation will be described as a period of inaction on one enterprise of the creative system while a different (sometimes similar) enterprise is being developed.     

The Mystery in the Kitchen: Culinary Creativity

This article highlights the impact of technology on the ability of individuals to be creative within society. The role of computers in the creative act is explored from a broad perspective to allow for the discovery of general principles of creativity. Insight into the barriers that individuals must overcome to function creatively in the information age are then presented. To this end, the process by which creativity occurs is reviewed, and the consequences of the development of technology and the impact of computers on creativity are discussed. Examples of computers used to facilitate creativity are then illustrated. Finally, the necessary conditions for creativity to exist in society are highlighted, and suggestions are offered for the coexistence of creativity and technology in the future.     

Creative cognition, conceptual combination, and the creative writing of Stephen R. Donaldson

This article explores the reported use of conceptual combination in Stephen R. Donaldson's development of the idea for his award-winning fantasy series. The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. Donaldson's (1991) own account is used to illustrate the general principles of a creative cognition approach to understanding creativity as well as the more specific role of the basic process of conceptual combination. The links between Donaldson's and others' anecdotal accounts of creativity and laboratory investigations are assessed. The article concludes with an argument for a "convergence" approach in which information from anecdotal accounts and laboratory studies is combined to provide a more complete picture of creative functioning than either approach alone can offer.     

Linking Proactive Personality to Creative Performance: The Role of Job Crafting and High-Involvement Work Systems

This study proposed that job crafting serves as a mechanism reflecting how proactive personality affects creative performance, and this study explored whether these relationships are moderated by high-involvement work systems. Drawn from the conservation of resources theory to develop a cross-level moderated mediation model, a three-wave longitudinal study was conducted with 346 employees and their supervisors in 27 high technology firms in China. This study found that proactive personality was positively related to creative performance and that job crafting mediated the relationship between proactive personality and creative performance, and an indirect effect of proactive personality on creative performance through job crafting was significant when high-involvement work systems was low but not high. Thus, the research results indicate that when human resource management involves less participatory management, incentive rewards, extensive training and information sharing, proactive employees can draw from their personality to craft their job tasks, relations and cognitions, thereby improving creative performance. The theoretical and managerial implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.     

Metaphorical sense-making: visual-narrative language portraits of South African students

This article reflects on a creative visual-narrative approach to understanding South African students’ lived experiences of languages. Data were collected in two interviews: the first entailing a biographical history and the drawing of a linguistic portrait on a simple body outline and the second a narrative interview utilising the portrait generated in the first as a basis for talking about language and identity. Framing the research process in this creative visual mode shifts the focus of narrative talk, simultaneously grounding it in affective, embodied experience, and enabling a reflexive position from which to analyse the taken-for-granted role of language in the minutiae of everyday life. The theoretical lenses of identity and subjectivity are invigorated through these metaphorical representations, and new creative possibilities are released for analysing the role of language in mediating shifting power dynamics in post-apartheid and postcolonial South African life.     

Special Abstract Section: National Conference in Sales Management

Sales managers need a practical means for evaluating returns from investments in sales technology implementations (including sales automation and sales-based customer relationship management systems). This research proposes a behavioral process model approach that can be applied to evaluate sales technology implementations. We develop and test the model with data collected from the sales force of a major consumer packaged goods company. The results indicate that a salesperson’s technology orientation has a direct impact on internal role performance, and it affects performance with customers through a double-mediated mechanism involving the effective use of information and smart selling behaviors (planning and adaptive selling). Sales managers can influence sales technology orientation by providing better internal technology support, considering technology orientation along with customer’s approval of technology in account assignments, and understanding the probability of negative effects through a salesperson’s experience. In our sample, salesperson experience correlates with age, suggesting a “generation gap” effect on sales technology orientation.     

Employing emotions to drive plot generation in a computer-based storyteller

Emotions are an integral part of the creative process; however, it is hard to find computer models of creativity where emotions play a fundamental role. This paper describes a computer model for plot generation based on emotions and tensions between characters. In particular, the document illustrates how emotions are employed to progress a story in a coherent way and generate novel situations, and how the dramatic tension of the story in progress can be employed to evaluate its interestingness. The model is implemented in a computer program named MEXICA [Pérez y Pérez, R., & Sharples, M. (2001). MEXICA: a computer model of a cognitive account of creative writing. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 13(2), 119–139]; this work concentrates on the role of emotions in plot generation. The main claim is that a story can be represented as a cluster or group of emotional links and tensions between characters that progresses over story-time; story-actions work as operators that modify such clusters. I present results showing how story generation is affected by various model parameters. This approach means the program is flexible, as it avoids using predefined story-structures or characters’ goals to drive story generation. Furthermore, evaluation of computer generated stories showed that MEXICA’s stories were most often selected as the best story. This suggests that the story-generation mechanisms within MEXICA are sufficiently rich to generate interesting and novel stories.     

内部人身份感知对员工创新行为的影响——创新自我效能感和遵从权威的作用

通过对325名员工及其领导的配对问卷调查,探讨内部人身份感知对员工创新行为的作用机制。研究发现:内部人身份感知与创新行为显著正相关;内部人身份感知与创新自我效能感显著正相关;创新自我效能感部分中介了内部人身份感知对创新行为的影响;遵从权威对创新自我效能感与创新行为之间的关系具有负向调节作用;遵从权威调节了创新自我效能感在内部人身份感知与创新行为之间的中介作用。     

Qualitative Changes in Creativity in the Second Half of life: A Life-Span Developmental Perspective

ABSTRACT Research on the relationship between creativity and age has been based on two seemingly incompatible sets of assumptions. The deficit approach maintains and has demonstrated that creative productivity and age have a linear relationship—that is, creativity declines over the life-span. The alternate approach, upon which the present paper is founded, maintains that creative productivity and creative ability are not identical. Further, this life-span developmental approach posits that supposed declines in creativity actually may reflect qualitative changes in the underlying creative process. Thus, different stages of the life-span are characterized by different kinds of creativity. Empirical and theoretical literature on wisdom and mature forms of thinking will be used to further answer the central questions of this paper: what might creativity in the second half of life look like?     

Resources Matter: Combined Influence of Job Demands and Job Control on Creative Process Engagement

Considerable research has been conducted on employee creativity, but it has generally focused on creative outcomes and rarely paid attention to employees’ engagement in creative processes, that is, creative process engagement. Further, job characteristics as antecedents are little understood. Drawing on the job demands-resources model and the conservation of resources theory, this study examines the relationship between challenge-hindrance demands and creative process engagement at different levels of job control. In total, 572 questionnaires from China were used to test our proposed model through hierarchical regression analysis. The results show that when job control is high, the effect of challenge demands on creative process engagement is U-shaped, while that of hindrance demands is negative. When job control is low, both challenge and hindrance demands are not related to creative process engagement.     

The Point of Creative Frustration and the Creative Process: A New Look at an Old Model

An extension of Graham Wallas's model of the creative process is presented. Wallas's stages of preparation, Incubation, Illumination and Verification are reviewed, extended and integrated with the present model. Periods of Problem-Solving, Incubation and Growth are established with specific points of Initial Idea Inception, Creative Frustration and Illumination. The idea that a specific point of creative frustration occurring within the creative process is introduced. Responses to the Point of Creative Frustration are proposed: Denial, Rationalization, Acceptance of Stagnation and New Growth. The significance of the extended model is discussed.     

Models of the Creative Process: Past,Present and Future

The creative process, one of the key topics discussed in Guilford's (1950) address to the American Psychological Association and his subsequent work, refers to the sequence of thoughts and actions that leads to novel, adaptive productions. This article examines conceptions of the creative process that have been advocated during the past century. In particular, stage-based models of the creative process are discussed and the evolution of these models is traced. Empirical research suggests that the basic 4-stage model of the creative process may need to be revised or replaced. Several key questions about the creative process are raised, such as how the creative process differs from the noncreative process and how process-related differences may lead to different levels of creative performance. New directions for future research are identified.     

Knowledge mapping: The consolidation of the technology management discipline

The paper presents a method of conceptual mapping of knowledge during the consolidation process of an interdisciplinary domain into an emerging discipline. This approach allows tracking the evolution of an emerging discipline of technology management. Knowledge consolidation is the result of colliding source disciplines and the simultaneous influence of changing paradigms. Three paradigms have played major role in recent development of the emerging discipline: (1) engineering management paradigm, (2) management of technology paradigm, and (3) technological entrepreneurship paradigm. The changing needs of practice drive the process. Knowledge mapping approach identifies elements of that process. Those elements (concepts) are identified and used for building a map of knowledge. The impact of different source disciplines (such as economics, management science, psychology, engineering sciences, systems science, and sociology) is characterized by affinities they have with concepts developed and applied in the emerging discipline. Linkages among those concepts are graphically interpreted in the map of knowledge. where he is also the Director of the Center for Technological Innovation Leadership and Entrepreneurship (CenTILE).     

Human capital and the Matthew effect: Description does not imply prescription

This article presents a philosophical perspective on creativity as described in the writings of George Sudarshan, a highly accomplished theoretical physicist and natural philosopher whose vision of creativity was influenced by “the direct experience of transcendence.” The article reviews his conceptualization of the various mental states modeling the mind as a superfluid and as a collection of harmonic oscillators, which include feelings, consciousness, and altered states. Based on Sudarshan's experiences of discovering knowledge and expressing creativity, this article examines several philosophical assertions about the sources of creative impulse and the nature of the creative process. In addition, the significance of philosophical issues, such as the role of experienced and transcendent time, “critical opalescence,” intuition, grace, ideal states of being and awareness, joy, and illumined perception are also reviewed. The significance of witnessing pure awareness (distinct from individuated ego awareness) in the emergence of the creative self is described and a philosophical framework relating to reconciliation of diverse conforming and creative modes of awareness is outlined. Borrowing from science and philosophy, the article discusses the role of wisdom, use of analogies, metaphors, and moral responsibility in creative functioning. A philosophical conceptualization underlying the rishi model of a creative scientist is presented. The article concludes that transcendence is the key to becoming a fulfilled, actualized, creative being.     

Supervising Counselors-in-Training Through a Developmental,Narrative Model

The developmental narrative model (DNM) to supervision introduces a creative postmodern supervision approach designed to increase counselor-in-training competency through counselor awareness, the use of storying, and a commitment to social advocacy. This collaborative supervision model pulls from narrative therapy and incorporates the developmental needs of counselors-in-training through the integrated developmental model. The purpose of this article is threefold: (a) review the major tenets of DNM supervision, (b) present the supervisors’ role within the approach, and (c) identify strengths and limitations of the DNM model in action.     

How Artists Create: An Empirical Study of MFA Painting Students

This paper reports on an interview study with MFA students in two different full‐time MFA degree programs in painting. The interviews were conducted as part of two ethnographic studies, each one academic year in length, of art and design schools at two U.S. universities. The goal was to explore the extended process whereby MFA student artists, in the second and final year of their degree program, create the works to be displayed in their public graduation exhibition. Using a grounded theory approach, an emergent theory was developed from the interviews, with additional information provided by studio observations and analyses of the graduation exhibitions and the accompanying written theses. This emergent theory describes the artistic creative process to be wandering, unpredictable, non‐linear, and embedded in the physical act of generating work. There is no evidence that either moments of insight, or the attempt to be original, play a role in their creative process. This emergent theory is compared with theories of the creative process by creativity researchers, and with theories of the design process proposed by design studies researchers.     

Creativity and Dreaming: Correlation of Reported Dream Incorporation Into Waking Behavior With Level and Type of Creative Interest

Dreaming has been postulated to be a functional intrapersonal component of the creative experience. In this study, a previously validated questionnaire is used in a sleep laboratory population (N = 517) to assess levels of dream incorporation into waking behavior. Those responses are correlated with reported levels of involvement and self-defined types of the creative process. Greater involvement in creative process was significantly associated with greater incorporation of dreams into waking behavior. The reported types of creative outlet were divided for analysis between those with a creative product and those without product (experiential). The creative product grouping showed higher levels of reported dream incorporation into behavior than the experiential grouping, with both of these groupings reporting significantly higher levels of dream incorporation into waking behavior than the grouping reporting no creative outlet. Gender differences were found for both incorporation of dreaming into waking (significantly higher responses in females) and types of creative outlet (creative product significantly higher in females, experiential in males). In this study, level of interest in the creative process was positively correlated with reported level of dream incorporation into waking behavior. This study suggests that dreaming is likely to have a functional role in the creative process.     

Towards a neurobiology of creativity in nonhuman animals

We propose a cognitive and neurobiological framework for creativity in nonhuman animals based on the framework previously proposed by Kaufman and Kaufman (2004), with additional insight from recent animal behavior research, behavioral neuroscience, and creativity theories. The additional information has lead to three major changes in the 2004 model-the addition of novelty seeking as a subcategory of novelty recognition, the addition of specific neurological processing sites that correspond to each of the processes, and the transformation of the model into a spectrum in which all three levels represent different degrees of the creative process (emphasis on process) and the top level, dubbed innovation, is defined by the creative product. The framework remains a three-level model of creativity. The first level is composed of both the cognitive ability to recognize novelty, a process linked to hippocampal function, and the seeking out of novelty, which is linked to dopamine systems. The next level is observational learning, which can range in complexity from imitation to the cultural transmission of creative behavior. Observational learning may critically depend on the cerebellum, in addition to cortical regions. At the peak of the model is innovative behavior, which can include creating a tool or exhibiting a behavior with the specific understanding that it is new and different. Innovative behavior may be especially dependent upon the prefrontal cortex and/or the balance between left and right hemisphere functions.