Creative Strategy: Reconnecting Business and Innovation

CHAPTER 2

What is Creativity?

In Chapter 1, we noted that one of the causes of disconnection between creativity and strategy was a lack of understanding as to what creativity is. This is not just a problem for ‘business people’. Many in the creative industries too would struggle to articulate more than a superficial view of creativity. In order to get beyond this we devote Chapter 2 to clarifying the concept.

We define creativity as a temporal system with three levels:

creativity's content,

creativity's outcome, and

creativity's process.

The content of creativity describes the basic elements contained in a working definition of creativity. The outcome of creativity is a more pragmatic assessment of the impact or output of creativity, without which a creative act has little meaning. Finally, the process of creativity describes the dynamic processes and interactions through which creativity occurs.

1. Creativity's Content: Innovation + Purpose to Add More than Individual Value

Most contemporary definitions of creativity as content combine two elements or criteria. Creative ideas or products must be novel, and they must also be valuable. But the nature of an innovation (from the Latin nova, or new) depends upon context – I may have a ‘new’ idea, only to discover somebody else has got there first. Margaret Boden makes a useful distinction here between that which is new to the individual (‘P-creativity’) and that which is new to the world (‘H-creativity’). For the purposes of this book, ...