The evaluation of creative ideas is a special case of judgment and decision making. It is difficult to objectively evaluate creative products because most people possess an internalised model of creativity which is usually neither verbalised nor explicitly defined. Also, one of the main assessment dimensions of creativity, originality varies as a function of the evaluator's previous experience. For these reasons, previous research has provided practical rather than theoretical grounds for studying the evaluation process. The present thesis examines the conceptual basis on which people evaluate creative ideas. The aim is to identify factors and conditions which enhance the detection of creative ideas. A novel paradigm was created to test how creativity-related features influence the assessment of creativity. In six experiments, experts' and non-experts' judgment was examined regarding urban design. Two experiments established the expert ratings of the stimuli. Further two experiments explored the extent to which non-experts relied on four features (originality, utility, scalability, and riskiness) for judging the creativity of novel project ideas while the level of motivation was controlled. Overall, the findings show that non-experts' creativity judgment relied on all four characteristic features. Their ratings of the features predicted a substantial part of the variance in the creativity ratings. In another experiment, the effect of providing explicit task-related information was tested. Such information did not make a solid difference in the creativity ratings. A final experiment assessed the differences between making relative and absolute judgments about creativity. There was a large overlap between the selection of best and worst ideas regardless of which way the judgment was made. In conclusion, non-experts were found to possess a robust internal model of creativity and not to make random choices. Experts and non-experts were found to judge creativity vastly differently, they only agreed that utility is the most important criterion.

An individual-differences model of managerial creativity was developed. Based on a review of the creativity literature, four traits and abilities were identified as having relevance for creativity in managers: divergent thinking, evaluative thinking, work motivation, and openness to change, risk and ambiguity. The model was constructed by specifying behavioural descriptions of the creative management types that were predicted to arise from various combinations of high and low standing on these four traits and abilities. The initial model was presented to groups of managers in order to get their input and feedback. Moving forward with a model that met the approval of practicing managers, a concurrent validity study was designed. Tests and questionnaires designed to measure Divergent Thinking, Evaluative Thinking, Work Motivation, and Openness to Change, Risk and Ambiguity were administered to 223 incumbent managers, and criterion ratings of on-the-job creative behaviour were provided by the supervisors of these participating managers. Results of the research indicated that the traits and abilities included in the Creative Management Model were, indeed, important to managerial creativity. Managers who were consulted about the model fully endorsed the importance of these traits and abilities. Furthermore, two of the traits and abilities, Divergent Thinking and Openness to Change, Risk and Ambiguity, demonstrated solid validity in predicting prototypical aspects of creative management behaviour. In combination, these two variables provided a level of validity of sufficient magnitude (in the high .40's) to provide substantial utility to organizations seeking to increase the creativity of their management ranks by using this predictor combination for personnel-selection purposes. Despite the importance of the traits and abilities specified in the Creative Management Model, the empirical linkages between these individual-difference factors and the behavioural descriptions of the creative management types provided in the Creative Management Model were not strong. These weak linkages are largely attributed to inaccuracy in the behavioural descriptions. Psychometric weaknesses in some of the variables also contributed. Recommendations are made for revising the Creative Management Model and some of its concomitant measures. The implications of the research findings for management selection and creativity training are also discussed.

An individual-differences model of managerial creativity was developed. Based on a review of the creativity literature, four traits and abilities were identified as having relevance for creativity in managers: divergent thinking, evaluative thinking, work motivation, and openness to change, risk and ambiguity. The model was constructed by specifying behavioural descriptions of the creative management types that were predicted to arise from various combinations of high and low standing on these four traits and abilities. The initial model was presented to groups of managers in order to get their input and feedback. Moving forward with a model that met the approval of practicing managers, a concurrent validity study was designed. Tests and questionnaires designed to measure Divergent Thinking, Evaluative Thinking, Work Motivation, and Openness to Change, Risk and Ambiguity were administered to 223 incumbent managers, and criterion ratings of on-the-job creative behaviour were provided by the supervisors of these participating managers. Results of the research indicated that the traits and abilities included in the Creative Management Model were, indeed, important to managerial creativity. Managers who were consulted about the model fully endorsed the importance of these traits and abilities. Furthermore, two of the traits and abilities, Divergent Thinking and Openness to Change, Risk and Ambiguity, demonstrated solid validity in predicting prototypical aspects of creative management behaviour. In combination, these two variables provided a level of validity of sufficient magnitude (in the high .40's) to provide substantial utility to organizations seeking to increase the creativity of their management ranks by using this predictor combination for personnel-selection purposes. Despite the importance of the traits and abilities specified in the Creative Management Model, the empirical linkages between these individual-difference factors and the behavioural descriptions of the creative management types provided in the Creative Management Model were not strong. These weak linkages are largely attributed to inaccuracy in the behavioural descriptions. Psychometric weaknesses in some of the variables also contributed. Recommendations are made for revising the Creative Management Model and some of its concomitant measures. The implications of the research findings for management selection and creativity training are also discussed. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

The thesis deals with the topic of creativity, which is considered to be an integral part of human life and is often perceived as one of the major prerequisites of successful individuals on both professional and personal levels. The first few chapters are dedicated to human creativity from a theoretical point of view. They summarize all up-to-date knowledge concerning this topic and focus on research in this area. This later became the basis of my own research project I am presenting in this work. The following chapters are directly dedicated to the executed research project, which is analyzed in terms of its structure. The area of research and its goals are specified and introduced here. I then characterize the involved respondents, the proposed methodology and explain which feature or area of creativity they deal with. I then further explain the evaluation method of the collected data. As part of the output evaluation I pointed out interesting facts obtained through the research and formulated a hypothesis, which observes a certain tendency to creativity in relation to the chosen field of study.

<p>This thesis is an article-based (3-paper format) dissertation. In the first article, the research team adapted an input-process-outcome (IPO) model of group-level processes in the classroom, as a theoretical framework, to examine students’ experiences regarding pre-college engineering curricula, classroom environments, and their experiences with the creative process in the two engineering courses offered in a university-based summer enrichment program. Applying provisional and open coding to semi-structured interview data from 16 participants, an Input-Process-Outcome Model of Collaborative Creativity (IPOCC model) was developed. In this study, I grouped our findings under Inputs, Group Processes, Outcomes, and Mediating Factors. The IPOCC model expands the 4P model of creativity to incorporate more collaborative contexts. According to the 4P model, creativity can be viewed from four different perspectives: Person, Process, Product, and Press. The IPOCC model suggests that in K-12 collaborative practice, creativity involves group-level considerations in addition to individual-level components. The IPOCC model offer insights for educators in terms of input components, group processes, and mediating factors that can facilitate learners’ engagement in creative teamwork. Findings of this study indicated that a combination of challenging tasks, open-ended problems, and student teamwork provides a rich environment for learners’ engagement to think creatively.</p> <p>The purpose of the second study was to systematically investigate how novice/K-12 students’ visual representation of design ideas has been operationalized, measured, or assessed in the research literature. In the different phases of screening in this systematic review, inclusion, exclusion, and quality criteria were applied. From an initial sample of 958 articles, 40 studies were included in the final step of the coding process and qualitative synthesis. Applying provisional and open coding, three broad themes, and 23 characteristics were identified that have been used by researchers to conceptualize sketching of ideas, in novice/K-12 design activities: Communicating Ideas, Visual-Spatial Characteristics, and Design Creativity. We propose this Three-pronged Design Sketching (3-pDS) framework to examine K-12 design sketches. </p> In K-12 settings, one major challenge of conducting research on the influence of engineering education programs and curricula involves assessment. There is a need for developing alternative, effective, and reliable assessment measures to evaluate students’ design activities. The third study aimed to address this need by developing the idea-Sketching Early Engineering Design (i-SEED) Scale to assess pre-college learners’ freehand sketches in response to a design task. Applying the Three-pronged Design Sketching (3-pDS) as a theoretical framework, the purpose of this study was to examine evidence of content validity, construct validity, and internal consistency of the i-SEED Scale data. The data collection took place in a residential summer enrichment program for students with gifts and talents at a Midwestern university. Following different stages of scale-development design, a sample of 113 design sketches were scored in this study, and the scores were used to provide evidence of the validity of the data for the i-SEED Scale. The sketches were generated by 120 middle- and high-school students in a collaborative design-oriented course. Exploratory factor analysis results supported a three-factor model for the i-SEED Scale, including Visual-Spatial Characteristics, Design Creativity, and Communicating Ideas.

The early-twentieth-century culture in western art music of idolizing the composer as the autonomous creative genius has been challenged by recent developments across musicology and creativity research literature. The composer’s music is now regarded as the product of a collaborative network, influenced by all who come into contact with it—first and foremost the performer. Yet, the nature of the performer’s creative impact on the compositional process remains under-explored. This thesis is centred on a qualitative artistic research project, designed to identify and critically evaluate the prospective extent and scope of creative performer agency; it aims to ascertain how a typical lack of familiarity with the instrument may affect the composer’s creative practice, and to reveal key factors that shape the nature and the consequences of composer-performer interaction and collaboration. It proceeds by commissioning new works for guitar from a range of composers for different performers, and by documenting and analysing the processes of collaboration that result. This research agenda challenges the perception of distinct creative roles that remains resilient in present-day cultural understandings and discourse. The findings are intended to broaden understanding of contemporary collaborative practices in the compositional process for the guitar and generalize to the guitar repertoire of the long twentieth century, during which the majority of substantial works were composed in collaboration. The thesis also contributes to a developing and generalizable framework of practice-led research literature that analyses music-making by recognizing the multiple loci and their interactions that underpin all aspects of the creative processes. Chapter 1 discusses the establishment of the creative hegemony of the composer and its opposing currents across disciplines from the late romantic period to the late twentieth century. Chapter 2 comprises an indicative chronology of select collaborations in the long twentieth-century guitar repertoire and an overview of relevant practice-led research projects in performance studies. Ethnographic methodologies are reviewed in Chapter 3 and the fieldwork commissions are analysed in Chapters 4 and 5. Finally, Chapter 6 comprises an evaluation of the performer’s creative agency and its significance when placed in broader frameworks of contemporary guitar practices, contemporary composition across instrumentations, generalizing to historical guitar collaboration and its implications for creativity research.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.

This thesis is concerned with creativity as an object of educational governance and a category of subjective identification. It studies a ‘creativity explosion’ in higher education in New Zealand, focusing on how fashion design students are being mobilized as subjects of creativity through ‘joined up’ modes of governance and technologies of educational choice. Using a poststructural ethnographic ‘methodology’ I explain how, from the late 1990s, models of educational governance began to appear dysfunctional and unable to deliver the attributes and capacities expected of citizens in a knowledge economy. I argue that creativity gained significance as a result of new ways of ‘thinking culture and economy together’. Neoliberal rhetorics representing creativity as flexible human capital and a generic, transferable skill needed by workers in the new economy, were articulated with liberal humanist notions about creativity, which are commonly understood and performed through the social categories of art. All kinds of individual and institutional actors took advantage of these shifting opportunity structures to position themselves with ‘creative’ identities. Within various cultural organisations, including universities, moves to strengthen a liberal agenda and retain creativity as a form of ‘arts knowledge’ with high cultural capital, rubbed up against counter-hegemonic strategies to enlist and develop more universal concepts about creativity as a collaborative endeavour, vital to new forms of capitalist enterprise. By historicising the context in which a new ‘normative doctrine’ of creativity has emerged, and by treating its theorisation as culturally performative, I develop the position that fashion design graduates, as ‘creative girls’, are highly productive performers in the new categories of cultural economy. However I argue that the creative girl occupies a subject position fitted to after-neoliberalised social and economic arrangements, not because she is shaped by neoliberal ideologies, but because she is made up by techniques and tactics of an ‘after-neoliberal’ governmentality. This demonstrates the mutual constitution of ‘creative economy’ and ‘creative persons’ and underlines the fact that despite after-neoliberal ambitions for managing education, there can be no simple cause and effect relation between higher education and economic performance.