Toward an understanding of creative solution generation

Researchers have sought a better understanding of creativity for more than a century and the resulting investigations have shed a great deal of light on the subject of creativity. Approaches employed to study creativity can be grouped into four overlapping perspectives (Product, Person, Press, and Process) each with its own strengths and weaknesses. These perspectives, known as the Four P's of creativity, represent a framework to help organize the existing creativity literature. This paper examines the creativity literature in terms of the Four P's and argues that existing theories do not sufficiently explain a cognitive mechanism of creative solution production in a problem-solving environment. The Cognitive Network Model of creativity aims to explain one possible causal mechanism behind the generation of creative solutions to problems. The implications of this model have the potential to influence the design of and techniques for using electronic brainstorming tools and may lead to significant gains in creativity as well as our understanding of how it occurs.