Operational definition of creativity

Creativity is considered the ultimate of human qualities, one of the key measures of intelligence that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Our ability to create, or to innovate, is believed to be Godlike – described by some religions as one of those divine qualities endowed to man, who was created in the image of God, the Creator. Anyone who has had a spark of inspiration, a flash of genius, or even just an odd good idea, understands this seeming divinity of creative energy.

But what is creativity? And in the context of this book, what is a creative product idea? Numerous definitions exist for the term – more than 200 in literature alone [1, 2]. Attributes of a creative product may be: original, of value, novel, interesting, elegant, unique, surprising, endowed with power to reorder experience, not obvious, qualitatively different, etc. [e.g., 2, 3, 4, 5].

In one of our preliminary studies we distributed a questionnaire to 500 people, asking them to define the concept “a creative idea.” Very few offered an exact definition, but all supplied a short list of characteristics that included adjectives such as “original,” “simple, ” “surprising,” “elegant” and “changing conventions.” As the level of agreement about the list of characteristics is rather high, we may expect the people who supplied similar lists to agree on classifying an idea as creative or routine.