Novelty Versus Practicality
Novelty and practicality are the two components a thing must have to count as creative, since it has to be new and it has to work. The standard definition requires both, and evaluators nonetheless behave as though the two traded off, treating a more novel idea as thereby a less practical one. The pairing is also a measurement decision, because once novelty and practicality are set against each other as opposing categories in an instrument, the instrument has assumed the opposition it then detects.
What it is
No originator is recorded for the two-component definition, which is a shared convention of the field with no single traceable first statement and is not credited here to whoever used it most recently. Jennifer S. Mueller, Shimul Melwani and Jack A. Goncalo built their implicit measure on exactly this pairing, setting creativity words such as novel, creative, inventive and original against practicality words such as practical, functional, constructive and useful, each then paired with pleasant or unpleasant words. A participant's score is the difference in how quickly those pairings are sorted.
In effect
Their stimulus shows the tension plainly. The creative idea participants judged was a running shoe using nanotechnology to adjust fabric thickness, cooling the foot and reducing blisters, and a separate sample of 36 undergraduates had pre-tested it as both highly novel and highly practical. Participants put under a motive to settle the question still rated that same object as less creative than participants in the other condition. So the supposed trade-off is not a property of the idea in these experiments, and shows up instead in who is doing the judging and under what pressure.
What it does not say
It does not say that novelty and practicality really are inversely related, only that evaluators behave as if they are. It does not establish that the opposition is the right way to carve the construct, and the measurement objection cuts both ways, since a result produced by an instrument that builds the opposition in is weaker evidence for the opposition than it looks. And it says nothing about consumers, where the related literature on really new products points in a different direction again.
Sources
- Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2012). "The Bias Against Creativity: Why People Desire but Reject Creative Ideas." Psychological Science, 23(1), 13-17. doi:10.1177/0956797611421018. Full text read in the author version, headed "In press at Psychological Science", rather than the paywalled version of record. The word lists, the running-shoe stimulus and the pre-test on 36 undergraduates are read from that version.
- Oswald, F. L., Mitchell, G., Blanton, H., Jaccard, J., & Tetlock, P. E. (2013). "Predicting ethnic and racial discrimination: A meta-analysis of IAT criterion studies." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 105(2), 171-192. doi:10.1037/a0032734. For how far a reaction-time score should be taken.
- Reis, M., & Kunde, W. (2024). "How to overcome biases against creativity: The role of familiarity with and confidence in original solutions." Cognition, 245, 105741. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105741. Finds the same pull towards the traditional option using response-selection measures rather than an association test.