Reclaiming disabled creativity: How cultural models make legible the creativity of people with disabilities

The field of creativity studies underrepresents—even excludes—creators who have disabilities. The underrepresentation partly reflects an approach that pathologizes disability. Disability as a pathology or marker of ineligibility makes the contributions of people with disabilities invisible or illegible to creativity research. However, disability operates as a marker of membership in a larger disability culture. Considering disability and creativity as cultural phenomena locates a means for including disabled creators in creativity studies. Cultural models describe creativity in terms of groups sharing values, experiences, and resources. People with disabilities participate in subcultures (e.g., deaf communities) and/or larger cultures (i.e., disability culture). Disability cultures encapsulate shared experiences and values as well as resources. In the following article, I pair three propositions from cultural creativity models with evidence from creators with disabilities to demonstrate that (a) members of disability culture experience the world in ways that generate creative expression, (b) encountering a world designed for abled bodies incites the creativity of disabled people, and (c) disabled and abled people collaboratively create. However, not all methodological approaches effectively include creators with disabilities. Qualitative approaches suit best when the researcher practices reflexivity and allows creators with disabilities the right to manage their own representation within the project.

Leadership and Creativity in Organizational Behavior

Because leadership and creativity represent two of the most popular topics in the fields of management and organizational behavior, it should not be surprising that a large body of literature has emerged in which the two are jointly examined. Leadership is a commonly studied independent variable, whereas creativity is an outcome of paramount importance for organizations, and the two are also theoretically connected in several ways, suggesting that leadership could precipitate followers’ creative outcomes. This relationship pattern, called “creative leadership,” is the most common way leadership and creativity interact in the extant scholarship. Most of the existing work has focused on “facilitating” creative leadership, in which followers (but not leaders) generate creative outputs, often as a result of leadership behaviors and styles, relationships, or the characteristics of their leader. This work generally finds that positive leadership precipitates positive creative outcomes, although some findings have emerged suggesting that considerable nuance may exist in these relationships, a promising area for future research. Much less scholarship has examined how leaders might direct others to implement their own creative visions, or how leaders might integrate their own creative efforts with those of their followers to enhance overall creativity. Research on these forms of creative leadership is often limited to specific creativity-relevant industries, such the culinary field and the arts, but there is opportunity to examine how they might operate in more general organizational fields. Other phenomena linking leadership and creativity are plausible but less understood. For instance, leaders may assemble creative contexts, engage in unconventional behavior, or emerge as leaders regardless of their hierarchical positions. Least explored of all is the idea of an opposite causal order—that of creativity affecting leadership, such that creative acts or experiences by an organizational member might drive or alter leadership emerging from themselves, their managers, or their followers. After review of the extant literature in these areas, potential topics for future scholarship are identified within and among the different research streams.

Research on the creativity of high school students in Da Nang city (Test TCT-DP)

Creativity is an important personality quality of a person expressed through thoughts and actions, especially ideas or products, solutions that a person gives to a problem, and creativity is the key factor to help one stand out or be different from others. The characteristics of today's new society along with the development of 4.0 technology, the expression of creativity in students has had certain changes compared to the studies of the past years. The study was conducted on 222 students in Da Nang city, focusing on describing the current status of students' awareness about creativity and their creativity levels, learning about the expressions, components of creativity as well as analyzing the subjective and objective factors that affect creativity. : Research using questionnaire survey methods and in-depth interviews to survey the awareness on the creativity of high school students today, at the same time using creativity test TSD-Z (The Test for Creative Thinking - Drawing Production) to test students' creativity level, analyze the development ability and the correlation between the components of creativity with respect to factors such as grade, gender, group of gifted or non-gifted schools, thereby finding out the factors affecting creativity in high school students.

Features of collective creativity and definition of creative potential in modern organizations

The article provides a theoretical analysis of the problem of management of collective creativity in organizations. The relevance of identifying creative employees in companies and encouraging the manifestation of creative decisions among all staff, the importance of developing the creativity of the individuals and the group as a whole are substantiated. Studies that prove that creativity plays an critical role in the management of the organization and the company's competitiveness in the labor market are analyzed. The key concepts that underlie collective creativity are considered: creative decisions, creative abilities, innovative activity, favorable climate of the organization, etc. The specifics of creativity in connection with managerial and psychological aspects are revealed. There are two main categories of creativity research at the organizational level: the characteristics of members of the organization and the characteristics of the organization that promote and develop the creative abilities of employees. The characteristics of support for collective creativity in the organization are highlighted: strategy (strategies with an emphasis on innovation indicate the need for creativity and innovation in organizations), organizational culture (organizational culture that affects how employees value creativity, as a challenge to different subcultures to interact with each other to gain shared experience), methods (as the need for formal and informal methods to encourage interactions, methods that are developed in relevance to the specific needs and context of the organization), leadership (as support for creativity, where leaders could set goals for creativity and encourage employees to use the full potential of individual employees and collective creativity).

Research on the Creativity of High School Students in Da Nang City

Creativity is now said to be an important and top priority in education today. This is an important personality quality of a person expressed through thoughts and actions, especially ideas or products, solutions that a person offers to a problem, and creativity is the main factor that helps a person stand out or be different from others. The study was conducted on 222 students from 2 groups of gifted schools and non-gifted high schools in Da Nang city in order to describe the reality of students' awareness and creativity level, find out about the expressions, their constitutive elements of creativity and analyze the subjective and objective factors that affect high school students' creativity. Research results show that 80% of students are creative at an average level. One special thing is that factors of academic ability, age, or gender do not completely affect students' creativity. Moreover, factors that directly affect the creativity of students come mainly from the intrinsic motivation of the students themselves, the school and family environment is just the foundation for promoting students' creative motivation. From the above results, the study proposes some measures that partially affect the educational methods of schools and families, as well as directly affect the survey subjects.

Speeding up to keep up: exploring the use of AI in the research process

There is a long history of the science of intelligent machines and its potential to provide scientific insights have been debated since the dawn of AI. In particular, there is renewed interest in the role of AI in research and research policy as an enabler of new methods, processes, management and evaluation which is still relatively under-explored. This empirical paper explores interviews with leading scholars on the potential impact of AI on research practice and culture through deductive, thematic analysis to show the issues affecting academics and universities today. Our interviewees identify positive and negative consequences for research and researchers with respect to collective and individual use. AI is perceived as helpful with respect to information gathering and other narrow tasks, and in support of impact and interdisciplinarity. However, using AI as a way of ‘speeding up—to keep up’ with bureaucratic and metricised processes, may proliferate negative aspects of academic culture in that the expansion of AI in research should assist and not replace human creativity. Research into the future role of AI in the research process needs to go further to address these challenges, and ask fundamental questions about how AI might assist in providing new tools able to question the values and principles driving institutions and research processes. We argue that to do this an explicit movement of meta-research on the role of AI in research should consider the effects for research and researcher creativity. Anticipatory approaches and engagement of diverse and critical voices at policy level and across disciplines should also be considered.

Automated Scoring of Figural Creativity using a Convolutional Neural Network

One of the abiding challenges in creativity research is assessment. Objectively scored tests of creativity such as the Torrance Tests of Creativity (TTCT) and the Test of Creative Thinking - Drawing Production (TCT-DP) offer high levels of reliability and validity but are slow and expensive to administer and score. As a result, many creativity researchers default to simpler and faster self-report measures of creativity and related constructs (e.g., creative self-efficacy, openness). Recent research, however, has begun to explore the use of computational approaches to address these limitations. Examples include the Divergent Association Task (DAT) that uses computational methods to rapidly assess the semantic distance of words, as a proxy for divergent thinking. To date, however, no research appears to have emerged that uses methods drawn from the field of artificial intelligence to assess existing objective, figural (i.e., drawing) tests of creativity. This paper describes the application of machine learning, in the form of a convolutional neural network, to the assessment of a figural creativity test – the TCT-DP. The approach shows excellent accuracy and speed, eliminating traditional barriers to the use of these objective, figural creativity tests and opening new avenues for automated creativity assessment.

Can Induced Gratitude Improve Creative Performance on Repurposing Tasks?

Urgent societal problems, including climate change, require innovation and can benefit from interdisciplinary solutions. A small body of research has demonstrated the potential of positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, awe) to promote creativity and prosocial behavior, which may help address these problems. This study integrates, for the first time, psychology research on a positive and prosocial emotion (i.e., gratitude) with engineering-design creativity research. In a pre-registered study design, engineering students and working engineers (pilot N = 49; full study N = 329) completed gratitude, positive-emotion control, or neutral-control inductions. Design creativity was assessed through rater scores of responses to an Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and a Wind-Turbine-Blade Repurposing Task (WRT). No significant differences among AUT scores emerged across conditions in either sample. While only the pilot-study manipulation of gratitude was successful, WRT results warrant further studies on the effect of gratitude on engineering-design creativity. The reported work may also inform other strategies to incorporate prosocial emotion to help engineers arrive at more original and effective concepts to tackle environmental sustainability, and in the future, other problems facing society.

Creativity in problem solving: integrating two different views of insight

Even after many decades of productive research, problem solving instruction is still considered ineffective. In this study we address some limitations of extant problem solving models related to the phenomenon of insight during problem solving. Currently, there are two main views on the source of insight during problem solving. Proponents of the first view argue that insight is the consequence of analytic thinking and a sequence of conscious and stepwise steps. The second view suggests that insight is the result of unconscious processes that come about only after an impasse has occurred. Extant models of problem solving within mathematics education tend to highlight the first view of insight, while Gestalt inspired creativity research tends to emphasize the second view of insight. In this study, we explore how the two views of insight—and the corresponding set of models—can describe and explain different aspects of the problem solving process. Our aim is to integrate the two different views on insight, and demonstrate how they complement each other, each highlighting different, but important, aspects of the problem solving process. We pursue this aim by studying how expert and novice mathematics students worked on two ill-defined mathematical problems. We apply both a problem solving model and a creativity model in analyzing students’ work on the two problems, in order to compare and contrast aspects of insight during the students’ work. The results of this study indicate that sudden and unconscious insight seems to be crucial to the problem solving process, and the occurrence of such insight cannot be fully explained by problem solving models and analytic views of insight. We therefore propose that extant problem solving models should adopt aspects of the Gestalt inspired views of insight.

Research on Supernetwork Equilibrium about Deep Convergence of Enterprise Alliance for Breakthrough Innovation

The realization of breakthrough innovation with high risk and uncertainty has always been the focus of the theory and practice of technological innovation. Based on the supernetwork theory, this paper constructs a supernetwork equilibrium model about deep convergence of enterprise alliance for breakthrough innovation and uses numerical simulation tools to find out the equilibrium conditions for deep convergence of enterprise alliance in different stages of breakthrough innovation. It is not only conducive to understand the process of enterprise alliance’s deep convergence in “Creativity-Research-Production-Sales” but also helpful to understand the roles that deep convergence in enterprise alliance can play in achieving breakthrough innovation. It not only expands the existing research on breakthrough innovation but also provides a scientific reference for the deep convergence of enterprise alliance in practice.