The research on creativity that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s
was initially organized around 3Ps: Person, Process, and
Product. In the images of creativity popularized by Hollywood,
the lone tormented genius is the exemplar of the creative
person, the comic book image of the creative process is the
light-bulb going on over a person’s head accompanied by a
cry of Eureka!, and the Product is inevitably the earthshattering
discovery in the sciences or the sublime creation in the arts that
will stand the test of time. In all three popular images and in
the initial research that started in the 1950s the unit of analysis
in thinking about creativity was the individual. Academically,
the focus was predominantly on psychodynamic, personality,
humanistic, and cognitive processes. Fueled in part by the
context of the Cold War, considerable emphasis was placed
on finding the best and brightest, and the selection of gifted
individuals.
The PPP model meant that by definition creativity was a
function of an individual. Making the individual – the Person –
the unit of analysis lead to an intensive study of the creative
person, but it also meant that the study of creative collaborations,
groups, and environments was almost entirely excluded.
Creativity was conceived to be something that occurred only in
individual persons. The creative process was considered to be
fundamentally intra-psychic.