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The phenomenon of creativity spans research topics across Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Interest in, and research on, creativity has grown over the past several decades. With this heightened attention comes the question of how best to conceptualize and measure creativity. This question is addressed by reviewing the conceptualizations and measures used in the psychological study of creativity. From this review, we build a framework by which to analyze papers from the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research. Based upon this analysis, we provide recommendations and best practices for future research. Of particular importance, we recommend the use of convergent problem-solving tasks in combination with ratings of novelty and usefulness reported separately. Such measures allow one to distinguish between instances of effective-creativity (when an idea is both novel and useful) and instances of quasi-creativity (when an idea is novel but lacks usefulness). The importance of the framework to research and analysis beyond the experimental paradigm is discussed.

The purpose of this study is to examine how dialogic spaces were co-constituted (opened, broadened and deepened) between students engaged in divergent and convergent collaborative learning tasks, orchestrated by teachers in Finnish primary and secondary schools. The concept of dialogic space refers to a dynamic, shared resource of ideas in dialogue and has come to represent an ideal form of educational interaction, in the contexts of collaborative learning, joint creative work and shared knowledge-building.

A socio-cultural discourse analysis of video-observed classroom dialogue, entailing the development of a new analytic typology, was undertaken to explore the co-constitution of dialogic space. The data are derived from two qualitative studies, one examining dialogue to co-create fictive video stories in primary-school classrooms (divergent task), the other investigating collaborative knowledge building in secondary-school health education (convergent task).

Dialogic spaces were opened through group settings and by the students’ selection of topics. In the divergent task, the broadening of dialogic space derived from the heterogeneous group settings, whereas in the convergent task, from the multiple and various information sources involved. As regards the deepening of dialogic space, explicit reflective talk remained scarce; instead the norms deriving from the school-context tasks and requirements guided the group dialogue.

This study lays the groundwork for subsequent research regarding the orchestration of dialogic space in divergent and convergent tasks by offering a typology to operationalise dialogic space for further, more systematic, comparisons and aiding the understandings of the processes implicated in intercreating and interthinking. This in turn is of significance for the development of dialogic pedagogies.

The purpose of this paper is to provide new elements to understand, measure and predict managerial creativity. More specifically, based on new approaches to creative potential (Lubart et al., 2011), this study proposes to distinguish two aspects of managerial creative problem solving: divergent-exploratory thinking, in which managers try to generate several new solutions to a problem; and convergent-integrative thinking, in which managers select and elaborate one creative solution.

In this study, personality is examined as a predictor of managerial creative problem solving: On one hand, based on previous research on general divergent thinking (e.g. Ma, 2009), it is hypothesized that managerial divergent thinking is predicted by high openness to experience and low agreeableness. On the other hand, because efficient people management involves generating satisfying and trustful social interactions, it is hypothesized that convergent-integrative thinking ability is predicted by high agreeableness. In all, 137 adult participants completed two divergent-exploratory thinking managerial tasks and two convergent-integrative thinking managerial task and the Big Five Inventory (John and Srivastava, 1999).

As expected, divergent-exploratory thinking was predicted by openness to experience (r=0.21; p<0.05) and agreeableness (r=−0.22; p<0.05) and the convergent-integrative thinking part of managerial creative problem solving was predicted by agreeableness (r=0.28; p<0.001).

Contrary to most research on managerial creativity (e.g. Scratchley and Hakstian, 2001), the study focuses (and provides measure guidelines) on both divergent and convergent thinking dimensions of creative potential. This study replicates and extends previous results regarding the link between personality (especially agreeableness) and managerial creativity.

The purpose of this article is to outline ways in which the large body of empirical work on creativity can meaningfully inform negotiation. In doing so, two general streams of creativity research and their implications for negotiation theory and empirical analysis are considered. Negotiation pundits advise that negotiators should engage in creative problem-solving to craft integrative agreements, and it is widely believed by both negotiation theorists and practitioners that “out-of-the-box” thinking and creative idea generation are necessary for win–win negotiation. Although practitioners have strongly encouraged parties to engage in creative problem-solving, there are remarkably few empirical investigations of creative thinking, brainstorming and other idea-generation methods in negotiation.

First, creativity as a trait is considered and the relationship between individual differences in creativity and negotiation performance is examined. Then, creative thinking as a causal factor is examined and how it may influence the negotiation process and outcomes is suggested. Finally, three considerations for further integrating creativity and negotiation research are suggested: communication media, idea-generation strategies and morality and social motivation.

A literature review revealed four studies that have empirically tested the influence of trait creativity on negotiation performance. Even less research has manipulated creative thinking or training to analyze creativity as a causal factor of negotiation outcomes.

This research will benefit both creativity and negotiation scholars by suggesting the limited amount of work at their intersection yet the opportunities that exist for further research.

This chapter attempts to elucidate the important role that divergent thinking plays in organizational creativity, innovation, and change. We define brainstorming as a systematized method of divergent thinking, review this literature, and advocate for the strategic use of brainstorming to enhance creativity and innovation. We identify contradictory findings in the research literature that have led practitioners and researchers to disregard brainstorming techniques. We suggest that cultural forces embedded in organizations may prevent divergent thinking and brainstorming from becoming established normative organizational processes, thus hampering organizations’ potential for change and innovation. The chapter closes by putting divergent thinking and brainstorming in perspective and provides guidelines for its use.

This research focuses on examining the dynamics of task and interpersonal conflict related to the creativity of teams over five stages of a project's life cycle. Data were collected from 142 respondents of information system development project teams of a service‐driven type, and from 106 respondents of new product development teams of a technology‐driven type. Results indicate that interpersonal conflict has a negative impact on creativity for a service‐driven project team. However, task conflict has a positive impact on creativity for a technology‐driven project team. The findings suggest that managing different types of project teams necessitates concern with the variations of conflict and creativity over a project's life cycle.

The influences of gender and task format on children’s collaborative activity with blocks were examined. Forty eight (24 same-gender dyads of preschoolers half of whom were girls) played with blocks under either a divergent or a convergent format. Children attended a community based child care center in an urban area and were predominantly Latino and African-American. Level of social interaction was measured by the amount of time the pair of children spent in interaction. The complexity of the block product was measured by: (1) the number of blocks included in the building (quantitative complexity); and (2) quality of structural organization as determined by the spatial and geometric architectural features (spatial and geometric complexity). Results showed effects for both gender and task format. Dyads in the convergent condition interacted more often. Analyses of the block structures showed that boys used more blocks in the convergent format while girls used more blocks in the divergent format. Girl pairs built more architecturally complex structures than boy pairs. These results show an important task format by gender interaction. Implications for early learning in math are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between individual work-related curiosity and worker innovation and to test the mediating role of worker divergent thinking.

In all, 480 participants, holding 188 different jobs, filled in a validated work-related curiosity scale and indicated their job title. Job requirements in terms of divergent thinking and innovation − derived from the Online Information Network (O*NET) database − were used as proxies for divergent thinking and innovation skills.

Results indicated that individual work-related curiosity was a positive predictor of worker innovation and that worker divergent thinking mediated this relationship.

Individual work-related curiosity supports exploratory skills which support in turn innovation skills.

Managers could use individual work-related curiosity as a predictor of innovation skills when recruiting, training and guiding employees.

This study is the first to show an association between individual work-related curiosity and innovation skills across more than 150 different jobs.

Based on a review of constructs that have been the subject of both educational and information science research, a model of learning‐related information behaviour is developed. The model details components of such behaviour, including: basic information processes, information processing types and information processing approaches; and factors affecting information behaviour relating to educational environments (in particular, learning objectives) and mental (including cognitive and affective) states. The complexity of information needs and associated relevance judgements implied by the model are discussed, as are implications for the provision of cognitively and affectively ergonomic access to information, and for research into learning‐related information behaviour.

Most educational assessments tend to be constructed in a close-ended format, which is easier to score consistently and more affordable. However, recent work has leveraged computation text methods from the information sciences to make open-ended measurement more effective and reliable for older students. The purpose of this study is to determine whether models used by computational text mining applications need to be adapted when used with samples of elementary-aged children.

This study introduces domain-adapted semantic models for child-specific text analysis, to allow better elementary-aged educational assessment. A corpus compiled from a multimodal mix of spoken and written child-directed sources is presented, used to train a children’s language model and evaluated against standard non-age-specific semantic models.

Child-oriented language is found to differ in vocabulary and word sense use from general English, while exhibiting lower gender and race biases. The model is evaluated in an educational application of divergent thinking measurement and shown to improve on generalized English models.

The findings demonstrate the need for age-specific language models in the growing domain of automated divergent thinking and strongly encourage the same for other educational uses of computation text analysis by showing a measurable difference in the language of children.

Understanding children’s language more representatively in automated educational assessment allows for more fair and equitable testing. Furthermore, child-specific language models have fewer gender and race biases.

Research in computational measurement of open-ended responses has thus far used models of language trained on general English sources or domain-specific sources such as textbooks. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to study age-specific language models for educational assessment. In addition, while there have been several targeted, high-quality corpora of child-created or child-directed speech, the corpus presented here is the first developed with the breadth and scale required for large-scale text modeling.