Each spring, an Olympics of creativity takes place for grade school, high school, and college-aged kids, teams from around the world who come together on a U.S. college campus to showcase their creativity. The teams display their creativity in two ways. First, they solve a mind-twisting spontaneous problem, a problem they haven’t seen before but […]
Category: Creativity
Creativity in Science
Great art and great science have a link, a link that begins deep within curious minds, a link that involves combining thoughts, stirring memories, perceiving sensations, creating new ideas, and producing original products. This “link” is called creative imagination. At the middle of the last century, linking creativity and science seemed odd, not especially practical […]
Domain-Specific Creativity
The world acknowledges Sir Paul McCartney as one of the most famous musicians who ever lived, first gaining notoriety as a Beatle, then founder and composer of the group Wings, then as a remarkable soloist, a career spanning over five decades. Less well known, however, are his other creative pursuits, including painting and poetry. His […]
Creative Children
In the mid to late 1970s, no one except serious hobbyists knew how to actually use “personal computers.” Most businesses didn’t own a PC, and commercial software hardly existed. Programs that were available were mainly for scientific applications or games. Yet a handful of teenagers who owned or built PCs spent long hours learning how […]
Travel and Creativity
Hemingway wrote while in Cuba, and Gauguin painted in Tahiti; Mark Twain wrote his only best selling book during his lifetime “Innocents Abroad” on board a ship. And in the 1940s, on a Greyhound bus in the middle of the night in Kansas, Princeton physics researcher Freeman Dyson cracked the problem of quantum electrodynamics – […]
Creativity in Business
If there’s one major culprit that kills innovation within corporations, it’s bureaucracy, and, unfortunately, most of today’s large corporations are bloated with bureaucracy – reams of red tape and “processes” that often bring creative breakthroughs to a screeching halt. Take for example General Motors Co., famous for its government bailout and bankruptcy restructuring in 2008. […]
Creative Process
Books, seminars, classes, DVDs, coaches, and others promise to teach you the keys to increasing your creativity, usually by giving you a certain set of exercises or activities designed to “unlock or unblock” hidden creative potential. Typically these programs or activities draw on the studies conducted by creativity researchers, or more specifically, on a particular […]
Identifying Creative Individuals
Multicolored hair, piercings in the nose, tongue, and ear – bohemian clothing – all bring to mind images of certain individuals, perhaps people leaning more to the creative side of life, such as painters, writers, or musicians. Yet of all stereotypes, this one is the most unfair because it leaves out a vast number of […]
Nurturing Creativity
Is it possible to teach or enhance creativity? Or is it a skill that some are born with or an innate ability that if properly nurtured only matures in some but not others? Research psychologists with an interest in creativity seek empirically based answers to these questions. They research how people cultivate skills in order […]
Measuring Creativity
Rarely do we ever see the terms “measuring” and “creativity” in the same sentence, let alone placed snuggly together causing the reader’s mind to do a double flip over the meaning. Some might even consider “measuring creativity” an oxymoron. When staring at a colorful abstract painting, dancing, watching a movie, or losing ourselves in a […]