One of the most commonlycited definitions applied to innovation is the following:
“a product or response will be judged as creative to the extent that (a) it is both a novel
and appropriate, useful, correct or valuable response to the task at hand and (b) the task is
heuristic rather than algorithmic” (Amabile, 1983, p.359). As this definition makes
explicit, the criterion is the production of novel and useful ideas. However, this raises
some problems. First, it might not be generalisable across domains: Sprecher (1959)
asked 107 engineers to define creativity and found that novelty was mentioned by only
18 people (compared to comprehensiveness which was noted 34 times). Both novelty and
usefulness are based upon subjective judgements (Amabile, 1982), and therefore are
domain and time specific (Ford, 1996). The degree of novelty needed is a contentious
issue (relative novelty, e.g., Swan, 1995; versus absolute novelty, e.g., Nyström, 1979).
Finally, the judgement of usefulness depends upon the referent. What is usefulto one
stakeholder may, in fact, be detrimental or useless to another.