I have looked at 50 years of research in Psychology, but cannot find any formal theory of creativity. Does anybody know?
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It sounds like an article I coauthored on innovation in farm tourism might be of interest to you. It takes inspiration from Ingold and Hallam and uses the concept of "imaginative horizons" (Crapanzo) to come to terms with the cultural creativity involved in transforming the farm into a tourist business.
I appreciate very much your kindness, it will be very usefull for me. I must add to my comment a new perspective: creativity is for me associates strongly to the supreme idea of wisdom, a very forgotten concept in the social sciences. Wisdom is not only knowledge, not even the knowledge of knowledge, as in epistemology, but the graduation of knowledge with ethics, esthetic and, about all, espirituality or, in a secular view, with myths, religion, phylosophy and common sense. Wisdom is not only a knowledge of life, but a knowledge that produces and care life, natural, human life and so is linked with creativity and, finally, with re-creation, of self, of others, of exterior life in earth.
¿Why, i ask to myself, creativity is associated very strongly, and also often dissociated with re-creativity or, recreation, even conceibing thes concepts as poiesis and also as gerire, the latin verb for gesto, gesta, gestión, gestación (I put thes worlds in spanish, for economy of time), and both of them derives from a more general matrix, the verbs in four languages signed as to play, jouer, spielen y jugar? Two of the most prodigal ideas on creativity, that of amusement (s´amuser) from Charles Sander Peirce, font of abduction, and the lateral thinking cann¨t or couldn¨t have been "created" out of that waste of time and energy derived from a distracted mind, aout of the center of the thoughts.
I believe Peter Medawar takes creativity as the premise for his study in which he concluded with the concept of 'paradigm'. if i understand correctly then he asked if science has a method then how is it that only some scientists make breakthroughs (paradigm: these revolutionize but not replace earlier models) is it because they are more creative..but if creativity helps add theoretical knowledge to science then the scientific method is not perfect...that i guess was the paradox but of course i speak purely from the perspective of creativity in producing knowledge within the scientific framework...
I think that creativity is a complex, very complex concept, in any case not a linear or scalar one: it involves not only rationality, but also affect, this in a very intense scope, also a moral or ethical commitement, and I think that much of creativity lies in the capacity of a person to look critically inside himself, aplying to the extent of the world inteligence, that is: intus legere. Creativity is a way signed by paradox, capacity to ask, more than to answear, o much better, convergent and divergent thinking, also amusement and lateral thinking, but for me, if I were sometime asked (this is very improbably, because my work is inside silence) the very cornerstone of creativity is the capacity to restore the child that we all have been and who has been most offen murdered by all sort of institutions, always nervous when a person ask because they are acosstumed to comand and receive obedience, even pooite obedience. .
