Creative Thinking: Processes, Strategies, and Knowledge

Creative achievements are the basis for progress in our world. Although creative achievement is influenced by many variables, the basis for creativity is held to lie in the generation of high-quality, original, and elegant solutions to complex, novel, ill-defined problems. In the present effort, we examine the cognitive capacities that make creative problem-solving possible. We argue that creative problem-solving depends on the effective execution of a set of complex cognitive processes. Effective execution of these processes is, in turn, held to depend on the strategies employed in process execution and the knowledge being used in problem-solving. The implications of these observations for improving creative thinking are discussed.