Taking the U.S. Patent Office Criteria Seriously: A Quantitative Three-Criterion Creativity Definition and Its Implications

Abstract

Although creativity has recently attracted considerable theoretical and empirical research, researchers have yet to reach a consensus on how best to define the phenomenon. To help establish a consensus, a definition is proposed that is based on the three criteria used by the United States Patent Office to evaluate applications for patent protection. The modified version uses the criteria of novelty, utility, and surprise. Moreover, creativity assessments based on these three criteria are quantitative and multiplicative rather than qualitative or additive. This three-criterion definition then leads to four implications regarding (a) the limitations to domain-specific expertise, (b) the varieties of comparable creativities, (c) the contrast between subjective and objective evaluations, and (d) the place of blind variation and selective retention in the creative process. These implications prove that adding the third criterion has critical consequences for understanding the phenomenon. Creativity is not only treated with superior sophistication, but also paradoxes that appear using the most common two-criterion definition readily disappear when the third criterion is included in the analysis. Hence, the conceptual differences between two- and three-criterion definitions are not trivial.

Notes

¹Huber (2000) pointed out that the Patent Office definition has been used by previous researchers, including de Bono in 1992 and Torrance in 1988. Few have followed their example.

²Galileo provides an even more striking example: His discovery of the lunar mountains was largely contingent on his prior artistic training in chiaroscuro (Simonton, in press).

³Although most “creativity tests” rely on social rather personal judgments—in the sense that someone else calculates a creativity score based on objective performance—sometimes a measure depends on self-assessments (e.g., Richards, Kinney, Lunde, Benet, & Merzel, 1988).

⁴The main change from Simonton (2011a) is that q _i has been replaced by v _i .

⁵Kronfeldner (2010) argued that sightedness but not blindness can be considered a continuous variable. This argument depends on the arbitrary assumption that blind variations must be exactly analogous to undirected mutations, an analogy that Campbell (1960) never maintained nor believed was necessary (see also Simonton, 2011b). We can formally define a blind-sighted continuum in which variant sets range from the utterly blind to the totally sighted (Simonton, 2011a). Blindness is thus inversely related to sightedness on a continuous scale.

⁶One of the central reasons why the discipline of psychology is “softer” than the “hard” sciences is that the discipline not only lacks consensus regarding theory and method, but also psychological concepts tend to be less precisely defined (Simonton, 2004b). Perhaps the only advantage of this conceptual vagueness is that it is much easier for psychologists to confirm their hypotheses than is the case for scientists in the physical and biological sciences (Fanelli, 2010). We can always reinterpret what we meant to say to convert a disconfirmation into a confirmation. Whether this is the best way for creativity research to progress as a science, I leave to the reader to decide (but first see Plucker, Beghetto, & Dow, 2004).

⁷I have not even mentioned a fourth potential implication of adopting a three-criterion definition: It may enhance creativity research in the cognitive neurosciences (for reviews, see Dietrich & Kanso, 2010; Sawyer, 2011). Although the empirical findings are so far somewhat mixed, it might facilitate inquiries when the phenomenon is more precisely defined. Of special importance is explicitly making surprise an essential component (see, e.g., Bowden & Jung-Beeman, 2003).