Creativity

Creativity is a human mental phenomenon based around the deployment of mental skills and/or conceptual tools, which, in turn, originate and develop innovation, inspiration, or insight.

Dimensions of creativity

Creativity can be assessed on several dimensions:

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• Intellectual leadership. Creative thinkers are able to create new and promising theories or exciting trends which inspire others to follow up; in essence starting a movement, school of thought or trend.
• Sensitivity to problems. Being able to identify problems that challenge others and open up a new field of thought is a mark of creative thinking.
• Originality. Creative thinkers are able to find ideas or solutions that no one else has been able to come up with. Patents are given out only to original ideas.
• Ingenuity. Ingenious solutions are able to solve problems in a neat and surprising way or which also reflect a new perspective at looking at the problem.
• Unusualness. Creative thinkers are able to see the remote associations between ideas. When word association tests are given, people in highly creative literary fields like poets give a higher proportion of unique responses.
• Usefulness. Solutions or ideas that are also practical are also considered more creative as the creator is able to meet the constraints of the problem while at the same time producing unusual and original solutions.
• Appropriateness. Non sequitur ideas can be highly original and unusual, but are not as creative as ideas which are also appropriate to the situation. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings Trilogy is within the genre of fantasy writing, but has also shown itself to be both convincing and imaginative.