Creative product

The essential aspect of creativity, the creative product may take a variety of forms because creativity occurs in virtually any domain of human activity. As Plucker and Renzulli (1999: 44) put it,

The importance of creative product emerged in response to perceived needs for external criteria to which researchers could compare other methods of measuring creativity for the purpose of establishing validity. However, an absolute and indisputable criterion of creativity is not really available, hence the criterion problem.

The most common method for the measurement of products utilizes the ratings of external judges who are experts in a given domain. Consensual assessment technique (CAT) is an example of this approach.

There have been attempts to establish attributes of form and content which distinguish great creative works from ordinary ones. Thus, Simonton (1984) used quantitative methods to explore 15, 618 themes in the classical musical repertoire and found a positive relationship between thematic fame and melodic originality. He also studied 81 plays created by five of the world's most famous dramatists (Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Shakespeare) using content analysis. He found out that great plays could not be distinguished from obscure plays on the basis of the particular themes addressed. However, they differ in the number of issues they treat but only insofar as the issues are expressed in memorable passages.