WHAT IS CREATIVITY AND WHAT DOES IT REPRESENT?

In the Christian  period: "creatio" came to designate God's act of "creation from nothing". "Creatio" thus took on a different meaning than "facere" ("to make"). The ancient view that art is not a domain of creativity persisted in this period. Many dictionaries today say Creativity (or "creativeness") is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts.

Although it is a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. Unlike many phenomena in psychology also, there is no standardized measurement technique. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, science and engineering. More than 60 different definitions of creativity can be found in the psychological literature. The ancient Greeks, who believed that the muses were the source of all inspiration, actually had no terms corresponding to "to create" or "creator." The expression "poiein" ("to make") worked.

The single exception was poetry: the poet was seen as making new things — bringing to life a new world — while the artist merely imitated.

The formal starting point for the scientific study of creativity, from the standpoint of orthodox psychological literature, is generally considered to have been J.P. Guilfor’s 1950 speech which helped popularize the topic and focus on a scientific approach to measuring it by means such as psychometric testing. The frontal lobe appears to be the part of the cortex that is most important for creativity. Kay Redfield Jamison studied mood-disorder rates in  creators such as poets and artists. She also explored research that identified mood disorders in such famous writers and artists as Ernest Hemingway (who shot himself after electroconvulsive treatment), Virginia Woolf (who drowned herself when she felt a depressive episode coming on), composer Robert Schumann (who died in a mental institution), and even the famed visual artist Michelangelo.

Creativity is also increasingly important in a variety of other professions. Architecture and industrial design are the fields most often associated with creativity, and more generally the fields of design and design research. The ability to "think outside the box" is highly sought after. However, the above-mentioned paradox may well imply that firms pay lipservice to thinking outside the box while maintaining traditional, hierarchical organization structures in which individual creativity is not rewarded.