Creative problem solving is the mental process of creating a solution to a problem. It is a special form of problem solving in which the solution is independently created rather than learned with assistance.
Creative problem solving always involves creativity.
To qualify as creative problem solving the solution must either have value, clearly solve the stated problem, or be appreciated by someone for whom the situation improves.
The situation prior to the solution does not need to be labeled as a problem. Alternate labels include a challenge, an opportunity, or a situation in which there is room for improvement.
Solving school-assigned homework problems does not usually involve creative problem solving because such problems typically have well-known solutions.
If a created solution becomes widely used, the solution becomes an innovation and the word innovation also refers to the process of creating that innovation. A widespread and long-lived innovation typically becomes a new tradition. "All innovations as creative solutions, but not all creative solutions become innovations." Some innovations also qualify as inventions.
Inventing is a special kind of creative problem solving in which the created solution qualifies as an invention because it is a useful new object, substance, process, software, or other kind of marketable entity.
Read more about Creative Problem Solving: Techniques and Tools
Famous quotes containing the words creative, problem and/or solving:
“Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.”
—Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)
“How much atonement is enough? The bombing must be allowed as at least part-payment: those of our young people who are concerned about the moral problem posed by the Allied air offensive should at least consider the moral problem that would have been posed if the German civilian population had not suffered at all.”
—Clive James (b. 1939)
“More than a decade after our fellow citizens began bedding down on the sidewalks, their problems continue to seem so intractable that we have begun to do psychologically what government has been incapable of doing programmatically. We bring the numbers down—not by solving the problem, but by deciding it’s their own damn fault.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)