We introduce and test a crowdsourcing technique for creative problem solving. In total, 1853 workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk produced 468 ideas for solving the 2010 oil spill problem in the Gulf of Mexico. In our technique, one crowd generated initial ideas, another crowd evaluated the creativity of these ideas, and yet another crowd combined pairs of ideas produced by the previous crowd....

Problem solving and creativity within the sciences and engineering are highlighted in current UK and European benchmark and policy statements as essential capacities. What these statements fail to do, however, is offer guidance on how these skills might be fostered, let alone how they might be assessed. This paper presents the conclusions of a three year research project to develop a dedicated ...

Psychological theories of problem solving have largely focused on explicit processes that gradually bring the solver closer to the solution step-by-step in a mostly explicit and deliberative way. This approach to problem solving is often inefficient or ineffective when the problem is too complex, poorly understood, or ambiguous. In such a case, a more intuitive or implicit approach to problem s...

This paper describes our model for the production of a variety of creative solutions. This is allowed by the mind ability of divergent production, which was claimed by Guilford as responsible for the construction of creative solutions, in opposition to the use of convergent production to construct ordinary solutions. Besides this Guilford influence, our approach to creativity is also inspired i...