Category: Creativity

By 1983, the accumulated bibliography of scientific writings on creativity spanned more than four centuries and approached 7,000 entries. Of those, Teresa Amabile noted, fewer than 138 were concerned with social or environmental influences — and in many of those, the “social variable” was little more than social class. Experimental studies of social influences on […]

There is a scene early in The Innovation Algorithm where Altshuller quotes Nikola Tesla’s assessment of Thomas Edison: Edison, Tesla wrote, would not “lose time determining the most probable location” of a needle in a haystack — he would begin picking up straws one by one until he found it. “His methods were very inefficient. […]

The Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT) has been, for decades, the most widely used creativity assessment instrument in the world. Its conceptual architecture rests on a well-established premise in the literature: creativity can be operationalised through four fundamental cognitive dimensions — fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration — first formulated by Guilford (1967) and adopted […]

The dominant paradigm in creativity research has long centred on the individual: the exceptional mind that generates novelty in spite of — or beyond — its social context. Lev S. Vygotsky’s theoretical framework, first articulated in 1931 and reexamined in a 2017 paper by Nicolás Alessandroni, offers a fundamental challenge to this assumption. For Vygotsky, […]