In a recent pitch, a client asked what’s the science behind our creative process. It’s a reasonable question from someone signing off a six figure brand investment, and it deserved a considered answer.
There is science. There is also, as it turns out, a formula for human creativity. An actual theorem, written by a mathematician who spent the early years of her career operating one of the first computers ever built.
Dr Ruth Noller began her working life in 1944 at Harvard, on the Mark I.
Harvard Mark I computer, Getty Images
The machine was a beast: 51 feet long, eight feet high and weighing close to five tonnes. It had around 765,000 components and a massive 50 foot camshaft, all in to run calculations for the US Navy ast the end of World War II. Operating it demanded absolute step by step logic. A single misplaced punch card or a misaligned gear stopped the entire system.
Machines execute that type of rigid, linear calculation flawlessly, input x formula => output. Dr Noller became interested in why and how human beings generated ideas that had never previously existed, input x ? =>output
And that is why she spent the remainder of her career studying human creativity.
At Buffalo State University she worked alongside Alex Osborn, who originated brainstorming. And, with Sidney Parnes she developed the Osborn-Parnes Creative Problem Solving process. That work underpins the university’s world leading Centre for Applied Imagination.
The creativity formula
Being a mathematician, Dr Noller devised a rather elegant formula for creativity:
C = ƒa (K, I, E)
The formula shows how Creativity is an output of applied Knowledge, Imagination and Evaluation. Knowledge is what we hold. Imagination is what we can conceive. Evaluation is the judgement of which idea to pursue. Attitude is the function that operates as a force multiplier across all three. Noller’s research specifically referenced positive mental attitude, a ‘can do’ mindset, if you like, as the real differentiator.
Now, AI may have eaten all the data on the internet - ChatGPT has been trained on an estimated 375 billion words. So the machines have the K part of the equation locked down. But how Imaginative can a two dimensional mathematical model actually be? And how does it Evaluate a good idea v. a terrible one? At the moment it aggregates to the centre, to the highest frequency, to the average.
And most crucially, how is it even possible to programme a lifetime of personal intrinsic human feelings, history, temperament and emotion that combines to make up our Attitude into computer code? I don't think it is.
There are parts of the formula for creativity that can only remain in the human domain, and parts that will be elevated by the application of AI. Afterall, it would take a human over 2,800 years of continuous reading to consume 375 billion word. So that's helpful.
Creativity v. Innovation
Innovation is something of a cliché across B2B brand messaging. Everyone claims it, and the words creativity and innovation are generally used interchanageably. But they are not the same. They refer to two different processes, and while creativity can happen without innovation, the opposite is impossible. Creativity is required for innovation to take place.
Writing in 1963, Theodore Levitt Harvard Business School's marketing professor was dismissive of the “ideas business”. Creativity is thinking up new things, and anyone can do that, he correctly argued. Creativity is just generating new and useful options. The real challenge is making those ideas work for business: that is innovation, and the intellectual discipline it demands is scarce and expensive.
Levitt was blunt about it, “ideation and innovation are not synonyms” he wrote. Ideation generates the idea. Innovation is the work of implementing it successfully.
Both disciplines matter enormously for anyone allocating a brand budget. Innovation depends on creative thinking having happened first, and then requires a process rigorous enough to take an idea from a Post-it, through various iterations, to a successful market position.
The human advantage
Dr Noller began thinking about human creativity in 1944 and spent a career researching it. The formula is as valid today as it has ever been.
With Large Language Models, Knowledge has become abundant. Imagination, and Evaluation (judgement and conviction) remain the scarce inputs and the specialist human skills worth paying a premium for.