What The Heck Is Creativity?

Before diving into details of what is creativity and ways you can achieve that, let me ask you first. What do you think is creativity? Stop reading this article right away. Start your favorite word processing software and write down your pearls of wisdom about creativity. Go ahead.

If you are done, you might have come across something like this. Creativity is something new. It is innovative. It solves problems.

Creativity always brings to mind the names of some important personalities like Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, Stephen Hawking, Stephen King, Ernest Hemingway, Shakespeare, Seth Godin, Charlie Chaplin or some other popular figure of the similar league.

People take a number of different positions on account of what is creative. It seems that everyone is yet to arrive at a logical conclusion.

Let us explore some other dominant point of views on creativity

• Creativity Is Non-Industry Specific

Creativity has touched on almost every possible industry. It can be found in linguistics, design, technology, psychology, cognitive science, and healthcare. You name it and it is there. It would not be wrong to say that anybody and everybody can use creativity for creation, innovation and problem-solving.

• It Is About Getting Knowledge

It can be safely said that the more knowledge you have the more liberty you have to create something new. It makes sense too. Let’s say you are a small business and you are approached by a student of computer science working on artificial intelligence to create a print advertisement on that.

They will not expect you to get a Master’s degree on computer science but you have to have an in-depth understanding of artificial intelligence to have an idea about why it is beneficial to the client’s target audience. Knowledge is an immense power to create something new, fresh and innovative out of it.

• Novelty Is the Essence of Creativity

A lot of people agree that creativity has a predominant novelty factor attached to it. It could be a new joke. It could be a new way of looking at things. It could be a new perspective to a cliché concept or a fresh analysis of the event.

Advertisers have used this technique to make millions of dollars for their clients and themselves. Remember the Apple Macintosh commercial? Nothing similar happened ever before like that. This is called novelty and it is an important aspect of creativity.

• It is a Fusion if Different Ideas

Novelty in creativity is often achieved by blending two or more completely unrelated ideas to create a new one, specifically called conceptual blending. Example, Metaphor, and analogy are used to apply this technique. "Swimming with the sea of sharks" is a linguistic metaphor used by writers to depict the intensity of the potential risk involved in doing something.

• It Is Valuable

Creativity is not valuable if it doesn’t hit the mark to create value. How can creativity drive value and who is calling the shots? Creativity produces the value if it does what it is intended for. The simplest example would be an advertisement commercial. If a commercial, intended to increase sales, does not get the job done, it is not valuable no matter how fresh, innovate and creative it is.

• It is About Imagination

Creative people possess above average imagination. They have a special eye to observe nature, people, things, concepts, and almost everything. They can quickly tap into their imaginative power and source inspiration out of it without a hassle.

Creativity is a concoction of different things. It is about infusing the different ideas to create something new and original. The aforementioned are some of the elements that define creativity in parts. Hope it helps you learn the different facets of creativity.