Creating is a craft, it is about being intelligent in creating and developing a piece of art, a new program, a new recipe. It is about level of detail and showing and creating things for real use. Creativity is a subset of creating, in creation one can also be creative, it is about being imaginative and presenting ideas in a new and different way. Creativity is the quality or ability to create or invent something. While creation is the very essence of invention and creation of for example artwork. As creating is the act of creation, creativity is the quality that the creating can embed. Of course not all creations are creative but all creative works are created.
Intelligence is the ability to do things efficiently, to use existing knowledge to solve problems. While creativity is about new concepts and creating them. In many ways the starting point we need to feed our intelligence is to read, explore and understand concepts and world around us. Intelligence is measurable and developed through education and learning. Intelligence is the foundation to what we do while creativity is new ways of doing them.
There are three main types of creativity:
1. Exploratory creativity: This is where the person goes beyond current knowledge and comes up with new idea and way of doing things that is different to the current knowledge.
2. Combinatorial creativity: This is where the person brings different ideas and inspirations together. The person makes sense of different ideas and constructs a new and combinatory form of doing things.
3. Transformational creativity: This is where a transformational and incremental change takes place in an area of activity or resource. So the person makes changes that will transform the activity to a new and sometimes very different activity or resource or outcome.
There are various traits to being creative. One of the traits is an openness to new experiences. This helps in accumulating these experiences to make new and creative connections. Other characteristics linked to creativity include curiosity, positivity, persistence and energy. When it comes to creativity it is about building small steps towards a moment where pieces come together and they create a new whole.
There are key networks that operate within brain to spark creativity. There is default network that helps to generate ideas. This is where we are not focused on the outside world and the focus is inwards and connecting different ideas. Second is the salience network which identifies which ideas are relevant and important – this acts like a filter from environment and scans for relevant signals (sensory, cognitive or emotional). These two influence one another through feedback loop (this scanning and checking is dependent on the task).
Overall creativity starts with us and is created by us. The extent and how we create and are creative is dependant on the way we make connections within our brain and our outlook in life.