A modern perspective on creative cognition

The typical creative process varies, not only with the domain of activity (for example, artistic creativity differs from that in science, which differs, in turn, from that in business and industry), but also with the nature of the particular situation in the domain. For example, a business executive’s creative positioning of a company for success in the long-term future differs significantly from a manager’s creative problem solving during the conduct of an on-going endeavor. Although what follows focuses only on business and industry, and we specialize to a certain type of situation in that domain, namely, complex construction project direction, we believe that our study reveals a way of thinking about creativity that would be appropriate with only minor modifications to the investigation of creativity in many situations in most domains. Our reason for going through a particular example is that the special abilities involved in each type of step in the hypothetical process outlined below could then themselves become the subject of academic creativity research directed toward issues of training and evaluation. Unconstrained research on creativity in general seems too unfocussed to be useful. , not only because creative thought is both awesome and often of great value but also because an understanding of the production of this uniquely human phenomenon portends the possibility of testing to assess an individual’s creative potential and hopefully of devising methods of enhancing creative ability through training. This paper posits that to exploit these possibilities requires an overarching, but not necessarily detailed, understanding of the operating principles of the human mind/brain system, and that modern technologies of neuroscientific research are beginning to make this possible.