What is creativity? What are the criteria that we can use to call someone or something creative?

The first 200 words of this essay...

What is creativity? What are the criteria that we can use to call someone or something creative?

Creativity can commonly be described as the ability to produce something that previously did not exist. Whilst there are also implicit suggestions within that definition of improvement, innovation and novelty, there is also an accepted, intrinsic sense of the essence of creativity as something to be highly regarded and not to be confused with success. As Sturnberg (1999) stressed in his critique; 'creativity is the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. useful, adaptive concerning task restraints)' (Sturnberg 1999, p.03).

Throughout the academic world a consistent definition of creativity as a phenomenon seems to be elusive among scholars. As David Bohm (1998, p.01) asserts in his work On Creativity; 'Creativity is, in my view, something that it is impossible to define in words. How, then, can we talk about it?' This statement, whilst possibly glib in its succinctness and admittedly presented here without proper reference to context, goes a long way to explain the frustration felt throughout academia regarding the subject of creativity not only as a definable term, but as a