Theories

There are many theories of creativity and ideation that attempt to define the nature of ideation, and provide a basis for improving the practice of innovation.

We (at least those of us in the innovation community) tend to think of ideas as being a particular type of intellectual asset. “Ideas” and “new ideas with potential value as solutions to significant problems” tend to be synonymous.

But that connotation seems to be fairly recent. Just dipping a toe into the history of philosophy related to ideas, it seems as if Plato, Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant were concerned with the “stuff” of what the human mind does, in a more general way – what we might label thoughts or perceptions or impressions. Which raises the question of when the more recent focus on ideas as solutions or products or tactics and strategies or paradigms, etc. took over center stage.

Nevertheless, Plato’s thinking is fundamental to a metaphor we want to come back to — the notion that ideas exist in some useful way, separate from any individual thinker, just waiting to be discovered. This relates to his “theory of Forms” and underscores his concerns with the “essence” of things.

Plato and his descendants considered these ideal forms or ideas (the word comes from the root “to see”) to be aspatial and atemporal, in the physical sense.

Descartes shows a kind of transition between the Platonic concept and a more contemporary treatment of ideas. According to Descartes, ideas are “modes of thought” that represent objects to the mind. He says:

Among my ideas, some appear to be innate, some to be adventitious, and others to have been invented by me. My understanding of what a thing is, what truth is, and what thought is, seems to derive simply from my own nature. But my hearing a noise, as I do now, or seeing the sun, or feeling the fire, comes from things which are located outside me, or so I have hitherto judged. Lastly, sirens, hippogriffs and the like are my own invention. (AT VII 37–8; CSM II 26)

His third category of ideas, sometimes called “factititious”, seem to be closer to our use of ideas in innovation.

David Hume seems to wrestle with a similar transition, contrasting ideas and impressions, with simple and complex versions of each. “Hot” is a simple idea, derived from a simple impression. “Fire” is a more complex idea, including light, color, etc.  Ideas derive from impressions; until they are reflected upon, they exist in a state of pre-thought.

Theories of creativity are of course closely related and highly relevant.  Margaret Boden (The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, 1990 & 2004) is one of the most important contemporary theorizers of creativity.  Her work is based on computational models and emphasizes “conceptual spaces”, which puts it squarely in our spatial category of metaphors.

“There are two broad types of creativity, improbabilist and impossibilist.  Improbabilist creativity involves (positively valued) novel combinations of familiar ideas. A deeper type involves METCS: the mapping, exploration and transformation of conceptual spaces.  It is impossibilist, in that ideas may be generated which – with respect to the particular conceptual space concerned – could not have been generated before. (They are made possible by some transformation of the space.)  The more clearly conceptual spaces can be defined, the better we can identify creative ideas.”