Beyond the intricate issue of definition, investigators have encountered diffi-culties in devising an approach through which to organize, investigate and emulate the phenomenon of creativity. Most investigators have taken one of three approaches, focusing on different aspects of creativity: the creative
person, the creative process and the creative idea. All three approaches pro-duced new assumptions and explanations that led to different strategies for
“cracking the creativity code.” Many of these strategies have caught the lime-light and were then disproved and replaced by others.
Focusing on the creative person
This approach is designed to identify the personal profile of the creative person. Investigators who followed this lead conducted physical examinations as well as personality tests on people who were considered to be creative.
Creative people were thought to be unaccustomed to staying within set borders, and to require an open and free environment in which to think. They were expected to deviate from accepted social norms, and even to exhibit mental disturbances and mood disorders (especially manic-depressive illness or major depression). Indeed, the idea of an affinity between madness and genius is one of the oldest and most controversial of all cultural notions.
Nearly 2,500 years ago Aristotle wondered, “Why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry, or the arts are melancholic?”
“Men have called me mad,” wrote Edgar Allan Poe, “but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence – whether much that is glorious – whether all that is profound – does not spring from disease of thought – from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect.” Many people have long shared Poe’s suspicion that genius and insanity are entwined [18]. This suspicion was enhanced by the many exam-ples of famous geniuses who suffered from manic-depressive illness or major depression.
Recent studies indeed indicate that a high number of established artists – far more than could be expected by chance – meet the diagnostic criteria for manic-depressive disorder or major depression. In fact, it seems that these dis-eases can sometimes enhance or otherwise contribute to creativity in some people.
However, it is apparent today that “most manic-depressives do not possess extraordinary imagination, and most accomplished artists do not suffer from recurring mood swings. There is very little evidence that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between manic-depressive illness and creativity. The data is mostly correlational, implying that manic-depressive illness and creativity may coexist, but not necessarily form a union. To assume, then, that such dis-eases usually promote artistic talent wrongly reinforces simplistic notions of the “mad genius” [18, 19].
In the early 1970s, cognitive psychologists continued to study the creative personality. They established a quantitative yardstick for measuring creativ-ity: a creative person was someone with a great flow of ideas per unit of time [e.g., 20]. It was thought that a creative person could cull higher quality ideas from a wider set of ideas, which might be missing in a smaller set of ideas. This assumption led to a series of creativity-enhancement methods designed to boost the number of ideas suggested to solve a problem – such as brainstorm-ing, synectics, random stimulation and lateral thinking (see Chapter 3).
More recent studies, however, have cast doubt on these methods. They show that the main difficulty faced by problem solvers is not generating a large quantity of ideas, but coming up with original ones. A large flow of ideas does not necessarily lead to original ideas. Furthermore, the very occupation with ordinary ideas seems to hamper creativity and innovative thought. No parallel between quantity and quality of ideas appears to exist [21, 22, 23].
Focusing on the creative process
This approach aimed to identify a singular, unified thought process that leads to successful creative ideas in different people. Its advocates collected written, first-person testimonies about the thought processes of creative people, and then attempted to define the general characteristics of the thought process that produces creative ideas.
The results turned up countless inconsistencies between thought processes.
Every creative person reported different experiences during his or her think-ing, and no tangible, defining process that characterized creative thought was apparent. The researchers concluded that free thought and lack of coercion were the foundations of creative thinking – that breaking boundaries and laws, and using free association and intuitive tools, were the portals to crea-tive thought.
At the end of the 1980s, however, this theory also faced difficulties. Studies showed that an unrestricted scope does not necessarily lead to the golden nest of creative ideas. In fact, restricted processes of thinking are more reliable for creativity [2, 21, 24, 25, 26] (see below). On this account, many popular crea-tivity methods that encourage large numbers of ideas have been questioned.
Focusing on the creative idea
During the 1940s, a chemical engineer named Genrich Altschuller postulated that there must be identifiable, repeated patterns or formulas underlying
successful creative ideas and products. The existence of such patterns would obviate the need for searching the souls of inventors or the subjective thought process behind creative ideas [27, 28].
Altschuller’s goal was to devise a systematic method to guide “ordinary”
engineers toward creative solutions. By a backward analysis of more than 200,000 patents and technological inventions, he succeeded in defining more than 40 patterns of invention that he labeled “standards.” Those non-intuitive patterns could be described, predicted and controlled independently of exter-nal influences. They consisted of system dynamics that could be determined solely by the intrinsic features of the products – a revolutionary idea in the field of creativity analysis.
The idea that creative solutions can be drawn from generic patterns isolated from outside influences may at first seem illogical, or even radical. The concept was wild enough to land Altschuller, a promising young engineer in the Soviet navy, in prison in 1950, under the charge of “inventor’s sabotage.”
Before that charge, he had invented an “immobilized submarine” (a simple, reliable submarine without diving gear) and a new noxious chemical weapon that could provide a diversion in order to help a soldier trapped behind enemy lines to escape.
At a coal mine where he did forced labor during his prison term, Altschuller amazed his superiors – life-long mining experts – in resolving emergency technical situations by applying the patterns he drew from product-based information. Finally, in 1968, he was granted permission to prove his theory in a public seminar, and to meet engineers who would then become his fol-lowers. Recent studies further develop Altschuller’s methods in the contexts of general problem-solving [9, 29].
The Creativity Template approach is conceptually consistent with Altschuller’s attempt to uncover underlying logical patterns in the creative solutions of technological problems. The approach presented in this book extends this view of common patterns by deriving universal Templates that characterize the evolution of successful products. Moreover, while Altschuller focused his efforts on problem-solving, the Creativity Template approach focuses on new products and services in the marketing framework.
The main difference between Altschuller’s approach and the Creativity Template approach is the number and parsimony of patterns or Templates proposed. Altschuller developed many. We found the number of Templates that cover the majority of successful new product innovations to be just five.
Reflecting the restricted scope principle (described below), this number is much more manageable.
In the context of ideation, the Sparseness Theory [e.g., 30] holds that almost every evolutionary search for ideas is likely to yield certain common themes. The Creativity Template approach contends that a substantial part of creative behavior is guided by those abstract, fundamental schemes. Even when the creative process involves an unstructured idea-generation process, many of the ideas generated will still be definable in terms of Creativity Templates. These Templates serve as “attractors,” or paths that the self-organized system tends to follow during the formation of new ideas [31].