The tower of creativity

In the field of creativity research, two paradigms can be distinguished. Both can be traced back to a seminal publication, the Art of Thought by Graham Wallas and Richard Smith in 1926, and to Joy Paul Guilford’s American Psychologist paper entitled Creativity in 1950. While Wallas and Smith conceptualized creativity as a thinking process, Guilford envisaged creativity as a personal trait. Nevertheless, a common element of both paradigms was that creativity is bound to an individual. Similarly, this is also the prevailing view in giftedness research: Creativity is a characteristic of an outstanding individual who is capable of either seeing clearly what is still indistinct for everybody else or of perceiving the outline of something that others cannot yet fathom. Individuals can use these abilities in many domains, such as the creative arts, science, interpersonal relations, leadership or sports. The individualistic paradigm of creativity has spurred many educational approaches, fostering such elements as fantasy, imagination, self-confidence, artistic skills and so on

Computational scientific discovery in psychology

Scientific discovery is a driving force for progress, involving creative problem-solving processes to further our understanding of the world. Historically, the process of scientific discovery has been intensive and time-consuming; however, advances in computational power and algorithms have provided an efficient route to make new discoveries. Complex tools using artificial intelligence (AI) can efficiently analyse data as well as generate new hypotheses and theories. Along with AI becoming increasingly prevalent in our daily lives and the services we access, its application to different scientific domains is becoming more widespread. For example, AI has been used for early detection of medical conditions, identifying treatments and vaccines (e.g., against COVID-19), and predicting protein structure. The application of AI in psychological science has started to become popular. AI can assist in new discoveries both as a tool that allows more freedom to scientists to generate new theories, and by making creative discoveries autonomously. Conversely, psychological concepts such as heuristics have refined and improved artificial systems. With such powerful systems, however, there are key ethical and practical issues to consider. This review addresses the current and future directions of computational scientific discovery generally and its applications in psychological science more specifically

Development of leadership skills: Experience and timing

To develop organizational leaders we need to understand how requisite skills are acquired over the course of people\u27s careers. In this article, a cross-sectional design was used to assess differences in leadership skills across six grade levels of officers in the U.S. Army. Increased levels of knowledge, problem-solving skills, systems skills, and social skills were found at higher grade levels. Certain skills and experiences, however, were found to be particularly important at certain phases of leaders\u27 careers. These findings are used to propose an organization-based model of skill development. Implications of this model for leader development programs are discussed

Leadership and creativity: Understanding leadership from a creative problem-solving perspective

Employees in many jobs encounter novel, ill-defined problems, and finding creative solutions to these problems may be the critical factor that allows their organization to maintain a competitive advantage. Solving problems creatively requires extensive and effortful cognitive processing. This requirement is magnified further by the complex, ambiguous situations in which most organizational problems occur. Employees must define and construct a problem, search and retrieve problem-relevant information, and generate and evaluate a diverse set of alternative solutions. Creativity necessitates that all these activities are completed effectively. It is unlikely, therefore, that creative outcomes will be realized without a large degree of support from organizations and organizational leaders. In order to provide this support, leaders must understand the cognitive requirements of creative problem solving. To this end, this paper reviews the cognitive processes underlying creative problem solving and suggests avenues through which organizational leaders can facilitate these processes in an effort to enhance the creative problem solving of their employees

Effectual versus predictive logics in entrepreneurial decision-making: Differences between experts and novices

The article of record as published may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusvent.2008.02.002In support of theory, this study demonstrates that entrepreneurial experts frame decisions using an “effectual” logic (identify more potential markets, focus more on building the venture as a whole, pay less attention to predictive information, worry more about making do with resources on hand to invest only what they could afford to lose, and emphasize stitching together networks of partnerships); while novices use a “predictive frame” and tend to “go by the textbook.”We asked 27 expert entrepreneurs and 37MBAstudents to think aloud continuously as they solved typical decision-making problems in creating a new venture. Transcriptions were analyzed using methods from cognitive science. Results showed that expert entrepreneurs framed problems in a dramatically different way than MBA students

Leadership as a determinant of innovative behaviour

In knowledge-intensive services innovative behaviour of co-workers is a critical success factor. In sectors like consultancy, research and architecture the nature of the work implies that projects are never alike. Innovative behaviour means that co-workers generate ideas for better and/or different products, services or working methods, and strive for implementing such changes. By carrying out certain leadership styles, entrepreneurs are able to boost innovative behaviour of their employees. This study presents an overview of innovation-enhancing leadership styles.

Effectual Versus Predictive Logics in Entrepreneurial Decision-Making: Differences Between Experts and Novices in the State of Maine

This study is a replication of research done by Dew et al. (2009) that aims to confirm that expert entrepreneurs use effectual logic framework as opposed to the casual, or predicitive, logic utilized by novices. In order to test this theory we provided 5 expert entrepreneurs and 5 novices with a case statement that provided information of an imaginary new venture and asked them to think aloud continuously as they solved decision-making problems relevant to this, and any, new venture while we recorded them. We coded the transcriptions of these recordings according to the scheme of the Dew et al. 2009 study and analyzed the coded results. We found that while the majority of the results were similar, there were notable differences among specific metrics, but not entire constructs. We posit that many of these differences may be attributed to the smaller sample size of this study and the three main differences between the two studies: participant pool, environmental factors, and the recruitment process. We further recommend that additional research be conducted to better understand the influence of the participants environment, innovation engineering training, and the participants overall experience with the recruitment process and execution of the interviews

The Relationship of Four Brain Regions to an Information-Processing Model of Numerical Inductive Reasoning Process: An fMRI Study

The present study relates a four-stage information-processing model of inductive reasoning to four brain regions. We assume that there is a fusiform gyrus region-of-interest (ROI) where a stimulus is visually recognized, a DLPFC ROI where an underlying rule is identified, a caudate ROI where a rule is applied, and a motor ROI where hand movements are programmed during inductive reasoning process. Then, an fMRI experiment was performed to articulate the roles of these four regions. The present study is a 2 (task: rule induction vs. rule application) × 2 (period length: simple vs. complex) × 2 (priming effect: prime vs. target) design. As predicted, both the fusiform gyrus ROI and the motor ROI showed no effects of task, period length, and priming effect, and respectively reflected encoding of stimuli and button-pressing response. The DLPFC ROI responded to task and period length, and was confirmed to play a crucial role in rule identification. The caudate showed no effect of task and responded to period length and priming effect, and was verified to be responsible for rule application. The exploratory analysis also demonstrated our assumptions. Thus, the main stream of information-processing in inductive reasoning process can be described by using the four ROIs

Externalizing the Latent Structure of Computer Games: Effect on game play, reasoning and implication for design

Computer games have initially and primarily been used for entertainment purposes. Recently, however, computer games have gained popularity in the educational and training arena. Epistemic computer games require players to think hard while entertaining them at the same time. Designing good epistemic computer games is complex and difficult. This thesis aims to further our understanding of how to design good epistemic computer games. Super Maze is a puzzle game that requires players to navigate through a maze picking up things on the way. At each junction, players can move either up, down, left or right. Four different versions of Super Maze were created. These versions differ from each other with respect to the representation of the maze and the way players interact with the maze to move through and finish it. The alternative representation to the traditional maze representation externalizes the internal structure of the maze as a tree diagram. An exploratory usability study was conducted to investigate how externalizing the internal structure of the game affects thinking and reasoning and if and how externalizing the internal structure of the game affects the gaming experienc