Creativity as a Process

Studying and discussing creativity can be difficult and complex, because no single, agreed-upon definition of this quality exists. Researchers have taken many different approaches to its study. Under the identification approach, researchers have developed cognitive and aptitude tests to identify more or less creative people. Others have studied personal characteristics trying to connect personality traits to creative behavior. Another approach is to study organizational or environmental factors that are likely to inhibit or nurture creative performance (such as goals, incentives, motivation, and freedom from time pressure). A third approach involves deliberate improvement: can we train people and make them “more creative” or better able to use their innate creativity. In a fourth approach, researchers have focused on evaluating and assessing the product of creative efforts: What makes a more or less creative product, whether it is a car or a story? They have established criteria to make the assessment.

We take a different approach, which is to understand and model creativity as a process with stages and steps. Our process begins with deliberately seeking out (generating) new problems and opportunities from scratch as an everyday activity. Importantly this generating stage is distinguished from the second stage, which is conceptualizing, that is, understanding, formulating, and defining the newly generated problem. The third stage of the circular process, is to optimize solutions to the problem and the fourth stage includes creative implementation of the solution. The process then begins anew, as the implementation of the new solution sparks new opportunities to be discovered and also permits further development of the implemented solution. We call this process Simplexity.