Towards an Understanding of Creativity and its Measurements

The European Council agreed in declaring 2009 the year of creativity and innovation.The Communication of March 2008 (European Commission, 2008a, 2) puts it simply:“Europe needs to boost its capacity for creativity and innovation for both social andeconomic reasons”. This paper aims at constructing a preliminary understanding ofresearch on creativity and the possibilities of constructing a “creativity compositeindicator” using large scale surveys and other existing statistical tools. The paper reviewssome perspectives on creativity. Despite being a complex entity, difficult to define, thereis certain consensus on some of the creativity characteristics. It seems clear that it isrelated to the appearance of something new and with some short of value. There is alsocertain agreement that everybody can be creative to some extent. A second part of thepaper presents some existing measures of creativity. They are divided into psychologicalmeasures related to divergent thinking and personality traits and a “sector” approach tocreativity. While the psychological approach is based in the more or less traditionalpsychometric models interested in individual level characteristics, the “sector” approachcomes from a different set of disciplines more interested in creative aspects of society.The paper concludes raising some questions about the possibility of using existing largescale survey data, such as PISA, to construct a creativity index. It also indicates thenecessary steps to implement a large scale assessment on young people’s creativity.These include: the development of a working definition of creativity by all interestedstakeholders, the development of a framework and tool for measuring creativity and theapplication of pilot and full scale surveys. How to obtain EU publications Our priced publications are available from EU Bookshop (http://bookshop.europa.eu), whereyou can place an order with the sales agent of your choice. The Publications Office has a worldwide network of sales agents. You can obtain theircontact details by sending a fax to (352) 29 29-42758. The mission of the JRC is to provide customer-driven scientific and technical supportfor the conception, development, implementation and monitoring of EU policies. As aservice of the European Commission, the JRC functions as a reference centre ofscience and technology for the Union. Close to the policy-making process, it servesthe common interest of the Member States, while being independent of specialinterests, whether private or national.LB-NA-2361-EN-C