Books by Philip A Lambert
Creative Dimensions of Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century, 2017
Lambert explains frameworks for understanding creativity, seeing different approaches to creativi... more Lambert explains frameworks for understanding creativity, seeing different approaches to creativity as pieces of a whole, rather than separate and conflicting points. The author addresses a question fundamental to this book: “Can we teach and learn creativity? And how?”
Papers by Philip A Lambert
Creativity Research Journal , 2020
For many years, creativity research had been yielding contradictory results. More recently, these... more For many years, creativity research had been yielding contradictory results. More recently, these results have come to be regarded as creativity paradoxes. This research reviews a growing body of evidence that highly creative people tend to operate, either simultaneously or dynamically, at extremes along continuums, where the extremes are considered at odds with one another. More highly creative people, it seems, tend to find a middle way, not by operating at a mid-point along a continuum, but by operating at and blending two more-extreme positions. An argument is presented that this is consistent with complexity theory, particularly the order-chaos dynamic characteristic of CASs, and that the number of paradoxes discovered in creativity research provides evidence for creativity being a characteristic of CASs. Understanding creativity as a characteristic of CASs leads to a new view of creativity and innovation, which could result in better creativity enhancement and innovation management approaches while also leading to improved tools to identify highly creative individuals.
Drafts by Philip A Lambert
Research into creativity has been hampered by the lack of an overarching theory and an accompanyi... more Research into creativity has been hampered by the lack of an overarching theory and an accompanying definition of creativity. This article presents a new theory of creativity – the complex adaptive systems of creativity. It is an overarching theory that is consistent with decades of creativity research, while also providing a theoretical framework that helps to explain and integrate those results, which are otherwise, at times, contradictory. A thorough understanding of complex adaptive systems reveals that creativity is inherent in all complex adaptive systems.
At its core, creativity is the act of assembling two or more knowledge elements (thoughts, ideas,... more At its core, creativity is the act of assembling two or more knowledge elements (thoughts, ideas, perceptions, or conceptions) into new knowledge. Applying that new knowledge in an appropriate way requires some skill. The conflation of skill and creativity has resulted in challenges in defining creativity and in developing a holistic theory of creativity. While there have been many attempts to come up with a broadly accepted definition of creativity, despite those who claim there is a standard definition, there is still a great deal of discussion in the literature on this topic. Notwithstanding the ongoing debate, there are similarities among most of the proposed definitions (see Section 7), to the point where contributors to the discussion may be limited by functional fixedness. In this paper, I propose a new way of thinking about creativity, and its definition, based on complexity theory and ontological emergence. This changes the questions surrounding creativity from ones such as ‘how can we enhance creativity?’ to ‘what parameters of a complex adaptive system can be adjusted to increase the probability of creative outcomes?’
This paper challenges the long-held assumption that diffusion of innovation adoption rates are no... more This paper challenges the long-held assumption that diffusion of innovation adoption rates are normally distributed. That is, that the number of new adopters of an innovation increases slowly at first, accelerates, reaches a maximum, then tapers off, thus yielding the classic, symmetrical, normal distribution curve and its associated cumulative probability distribution, the S-curve. From Rogers (2003) to Christensen (1997), Moore (2014), and Downes and Nunes (2013), this normality-assumption is pervasive throughout innovation theory and research. Quantitative evidence that challenges the normality-assumption is presented here. Diffusion data for six different innovations were analyzed, revealing no discernible frequency distribution pattern. This result – no consistent distribution pattern – is what we should expect if each diffusion curve is the result of a small-world social network with differing parameters. This paper examines the explanatory power of complex adaptive systems and their characteristic small world networks for understanding and managing creativity and innovation.
Thesis Chapters by Philip A Lambert
Creativity and innovation research has been hampered by the lack of an over-arching, internally c... more Creativity and innovation research has been hampered by the lack of an over-arching, internally consistent theoretical framework. This dissertation developed the initial parts of a comprehensive complexity theory of creativity. This is an articles-based dissertation, consisting of three articles that make individual contributions to an overall complexity theory of creativity. Each article established a potential link between creativity and one characteristic of complex adaptive systems. One argued for the equivalency of creativity and emergence, a primary characteristic of complex adaptive systems, while another showed how the paradoxes identified through decades of creativity research can be explained by another characteristic of complex adaptive systems, the order-chaos dynamic. A third article argued that the small-world networks associated with complex adaptive systems predict that diffusion-of-innovation patterns will be unpredictable, not normally distributed, as has been the dogma of business school texts for decades. A small number of datasets were analyzed, and the results support this prediction. In the concluding chapter, the results of the three articles have been brought together and a complex adaptive systems model developed. The model incorporates creativity as a central feature and includes continuous evolution and a feedback loop that yields increasing complexity. Together, these three articles represent a strong case for recognizing creativity as a characteristic of complex adaptive systems and for continued efforts along this line of research.
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Books by Philip A Lambert
Papers by Philip A Lambert
Drafts by Philip A Lambert
Thesis Chapters by Philip A Lambert