Surely you have noticed that, both in the professional, academic or personal environment, the importance of creativity is spoken of more and more frequently. However, it is possible that you are not clear about what this concept implies. In this post we will define creativity and we will see the types of creativity that various psychologists and authors have distinguished .

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INDEX
1. What is creativity
2. Types of creativity according to Maslow
3. Types of creativity according to Guilford
4. Types of creativity according to DeGraff
5. Types of creativity according to Taylor What is creativity
Let’s start by seeing what creativity is . Many people understand it only in the artistic field, or even in advertising (there are professionals who are called advertising creatives). However, there are many more areas in which creativity is vital to achieve results. Scientific research, education, computing and even politics are just a few examples of sectors that need creativity in order to achieve their goals.
And it is that creativity, as Guilford said, is “the ability to generate solutions from certain information, emphasizing the variety, quantity and relevance of the results obtained.” In other words, creativity implies solving problems by providing different, multiple and effective solutions .
Now that we have understood what creativity implies, we are in a position to know the types of creativity that various authors have distinguished. Types of creativity according to Maslow Abraham MaslowHe was an American psychologist who is best known for his pyramid of human needs. However, Maslow contributed to other fields derived from psychology, such as creativity.
According to him, there are two types of creativity : 1. Primary creativity
It is the product of an inspiration or a “eureka moment”. That is, people who provide ideas from primary creativity are usually people who have creative thinking so ingrained in their minds that they usually do not need efforts .to make a large number of original and valuable creations. Most of these people, however, show a problem, and that is that, due to the enormous number of inspiring ideas that their thinking generates, they tend to leave many of the projects they start unfinished. 2. Secondary creativity Creativity
that is the product of previous work in which the brain has absorbed information that it later combines to generate ideas. This is the type of creativity used by people who find it difficult to think creatively and requires a greater effort of research, analysis and work than that related to primary creativity.
The distinction between these two types of creativity makes us wonder: does a person’s creativity depend on their genes or their environment ?
The answer is that both contribute to its development: a person who finds it easy to think creatively but who does not train his creativity in his environment will be able to achieve the same results as a person who, despite not having been born with a genetic advantage, trains it daily. Of course, the ideal is to have both.
We take as reference Maslow, Guilford, DeGraff and Taylor. | Alice Achterhof. Types of creativity according to Guilford
We already mentioned Guilford when we established the definition of creativity at the beginning of this post. And it is that Joy Paul GuilfordHe was a psychologist who studied in depth human intelligence and, within it, creative intelligence. In fact, he is considered an essential part of a turning point where creativity began to make its way into the field of psychology, thanks to his conference “Creativity”.
Guilford distinguished four types of creativity : 1. Phylogenetic
creativity It is the creativity that is found in each person , regardless of their genetics or the previous experiences they have had. In other words, it is about the creativity that the person has at the current moment. Accordingly, all people are creative, to a greater or lesser extent. 2. Potential
creativity It is the creativity thata person can develop , and here if the genes and the environment influence. In the same way that a person has great potential to be a good soccer player, but will only achieve it if he takes advantage of his genes and trains to the maximum, a person who has creative potential will only achieve brilliant creative intelligence if he trains. maximize related thinking skills. This is precisely what we discussed above about the importance of genes and the environment in creativity. 3. Kinetic creativity
This is the creativity that is expressed in the creative process , that is, at the time the person is creating. 4. Factual creativity
This is the creativity thatIt is perceived in the result of the creative process , that is, in the final creation.
Therefore, we can say that Guilford distinguishes four types of creativity that, fundamentally, can be understood in pairs :

  • Phylogenetics and potential refer directly to the creative possibilities (current and future, respectively) of a person.
  • Kinetics and factics focus on the moment of the creative process in which creativity is manifested.

Types of creativity according to DeGraff Jeffrey Thomas DeGraff , better known as Jeff DeGraff, is a professor, consultant and lecturer who stands out for the business focus of his career. This reminds us that creativity is also of great importance within any company and, of course, in any business project.
When distinguishing his five types of creativity from him, DeGraff established them based on the processes by which it arises in the individual’s thinking: 1. Mimetic creativity
This type of creativity focuses on inspiration from something already existing. That is, you take something that already exists in reality and use it as a base to build something new. We should not understand this as plagiarism, since plagiarism consists of copying completely or with a minimum percentage of variation. In fact, mimetic creativity is the basis of science, whose advances are built on what previous scientists have discovered. As Isaac Newton himself said, “if I have come to see so far it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants”. 2. Analogic creativity
The basis of this type of creativity are similes and metaphors, which establish a relationship between two realities. This is also the basis of learning, since to understand and learn something new we always rely on another reality that we already know and compare the new knowledge with it. 3. Bisociative creativity
Sometimes it is confused with analogical creativity, but they are not the same. The difference is that bisociative creativity is responsible for relating two or more concepts between which there is no direct relationship. It is exactly what William Plomer said: “Creativity is the ability to connect what, in principle, is not connected”. 4. Narrative creativity
This type of creativity focuses exclusively on creating stories, that is, of the events that happen to some characters, real or fictitious. We must not forget that a narrative is a temporary connection of events, so we can consider narrative creativity as a close relative of the previous two. 5. Intuitive creativity
Finally, intuitive creativity refers to a person’s ability to abstract , understanding abstraction as the ability to create generic concepts from reality. An example to understand it easily is to think of the graphic representation of the number 6 as the abstraction of a certain number of elements.
Therefore, as we see, DeGraff gives a greater weight to the thought processesthat a person uses when creating. Depending on what said thought process is (comparison, connection, abstraction…), we will speak of one type of creativity or another.
Creativity takes many forms. | Phad Pichetbovornkul. Types of creativity according to Taylor
Finally, let’s see the types of creativity distinguished by Alfred Edward Taylor , known for his contributions to philosophy, mainly in relation to idealism and metaphysics.
Taylor distinguishes five types of creativity and does so by focusing on the purpose of the creative process: 1. Expressive creativity
It is the form of creativity that has as its goal theexpression of an idea, a feeling or any internal state of the creator. It is the one used by artists who want to capture an emotion in their paintings or in their poetry, so they use it to release and communicate emotions from within. 2. Productive creativity
In this case, the purpose of creativity is to obtain some kind of result or benefit . When a painter or a poet creates a work with the ultimate goal of winning a contest or selling it and emotional expression is relegated to the background, we are talking about productive creativity. 3. Inventive creativity
This type of creativity aims to discover aspects of realitythat have not yet been discovered, so flexibility of thought is a must. Scientists who develop new theories are an example of this. 4. Innovative creativity
Goes one step further than inventive creativity and, after discovering new aspects of reality, builds tools and instruments that allow adaptation to it . An example is found in antibiotics, which allow us to adapt to microorganisms that in other times would have killed us. 5. Emerging creativity
We can understand it as a higher level of innovative creativity, since, in addition to allowing us to adapt to reality, it transforms it in a significant way. We find a clear example of innovative creativity in the telephone, which began as a device for remote communication through voice and which today allows us to carry out a multitude of additional functions that have come to modify social behavior and even our own vocabulary.
In this way, we see that there are different classifications of the types of creativity. Each of them revolves around a certain criterion. That means we can each create our own kinds of creativity . Do you dare to create your own and leave them in a comment?

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Referencias bibliograficas
Maslow: Maslow, A. H. (1958). Emotional blocks to creativity.Humanist,18, 325.
Guilford: Guilford, J. P. (1962). Potentiality for creativity.Gifted Child Quarterly,6(3), 87-90.
DeGraff: DeGraff, J., & Lawrence, K. A. (2002).Creativity at work: Developing the right practices to make innovation happen(Vol. 28). John Wiley & Sons.