Current approaches used in studying creativity: An exploratory investigation

Abstract: Depending on whether creativity is studied by an economist, a sociologist, a psychologist, or some other social scientist, different terms—such as innovation or entrepreneurship‐are used to describe it. Therefore it is difficult to have a clear idea of what the boundaries of creativity research are, and what belongs to it. In this article a conceptual matrix is used to create a typology for creativity research, and it is applied to a sample of dissertations abstracts written in the last year for which complete documentation was available. The goals of the article are: (a) to provide a useful model for classifying studies in the field of creativity; (b) to provide an example of systematic library research on the topic; and (c) to show what the biases of different disciplines that study creativity are in terms of goals, methods, and perspectives.