What is creativity? Scholarly definitions

We are talking about creating more and more, but the problem is that creativity does not have a standard definition.

For different people, creativity means different things.

Because of this, we are mainly focusing on personalities and public figures that are creative. So we look at a creative person as eccentric, out of the norm, displaying some apparent traits that make that person stand out as creative.

This way of looking at creativity brings a bias of only looking for creativity in people out of the ordinary, which makes us also pass by many creative people in various areas without being non-conformists in their general lives.

So what is creativity?

I am reading a lot of papers about creativity for our Ideatify newsletter, so here are some of the creativity definitions that I found interesting.

"Creative work that is to be realistic or accepted must be done under some degree of evaluative restraint. Too much restraint, of course, is fatal to the birth of new ideas. The selection of surviving ideas, however, requires some evaluation"

?? J.P. Guilford, 1950, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0063487

"The creative work is a novel work that is accepted as tenable or useful or satisfying by a group in some point in time . . . . By ‘‘novel’’ I mean that the creative product did not exist previously in precisely the same form"

?? Morris Stein, 1953, https://doi.org/10.1080/00223980.1953.9712897

"we may proceed to define the creative thinking process as the forming of associative elements into new combinations which either meet specified requirements or are in some way useful. The more mutually remote the elements of the new combination, the more creative the process or solution."

?? Sarnoff Mednic, 1962, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0048850

"Creativity is the paradoxical integration of doing and being. Thus it is a flexible encounter with our world - an active letting go, an aggressive receptivity, a passive responding. It is the assimilation and integration of polarities to find new directions, new solutions, a fresh viewpoint. It is the Integration of our logical side with our intuitive side, our left brain with our right. It is all of these and more."

"Creativity, as I see it, involves three components: skills, newness and value. It is the skill of bringing about something new and valuable"

"Creative people do more than break away from the old patterns. They do more than find alternatives. They diverge from familiar patterns, but then they converge on new solutions. They break laws to remake them. They make hard decisions about what to include and what to eliminate. Creative people innovate. They aim toward newness"

?? John G. Young, 1985, https://doi.org/10.1002/j.2162-6057.1985.tb00640.x

"A creative idea is marked by three attributes: It must be original, it must be useful or appropriate for the situation in which it occurs, and it must actually be put to some use"

?? Colin Martindale, 1989, https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-5356-1_13

"Creativity is the interaction among aptitude, process, and environment by which an individual or group pro- duces a perceptible product that is both novel and useful as defined within a social context."

?? J. Plucker, R. Beghetto, G. Dow, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep3902_1

"Creative solutions often go beyond mere novelty and functionality to include a strong aesthetic quality. Creative products and solutions are deeply bound to the context within which they occur; they are integrated, organic and whole. Thus creative solutions are novel, effective and whole."

?? P. Mishra, M. J. Koehler, 2008, Introducing Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge

"Given the foregoing, we can now define creativity as C = NUS(or N x U x S), where N, U, and S indicate novelty, utility, and surprise, respectively"

?? Keith Simonton, 2012, https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2012.676974

"Creativity is an act arising out of a perception of the environment that acknowledges a certain disequilibrium, resulting in productive activity that challenges patterned thought processes and norms, and gives rise to something new in the form of a physical object or even a mental or an emotional construct."

?? Chetan Walia, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2019.1641787

"Genuine creativity requires a further element over and above mere novelty: A product or response must be relevant to the issue at stake and must offer some kind of genuine solution, i.e. it must be effective. "

?? Arthur Cropley, 2020, https://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-375038-9.00066-2

"creativity is the process that leads to an outcome that generates positive affect (e.g., pleasure) and is optimally (not extremely) novel."

?? Emery Schubert, 2021, https://doi.org/10.3389/fnins.2021.612379

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