The Structure of Creative Revolutions

Abstract

One of the more important questions about creativity is what makes a creative production a revolution ? The present contribution follows the analysis of the development of scientific knowledge proposed by Thomas Kuhn in ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’ to propose a typology that may contribute to an answer. This typology, based on a retrospective analysis of a given domain of productions, distinguishes between two types of creativity: normal creativity and revolutionary creativity. Creative revolutions refer to ‘game changing’ productions in the domain, creating a turning point in the development of this domain. These creative revolutions constitute major disruptions within the domain since they display both a high degree of novelty, and sufficiently high value for future creative productions to take them as a new point of reference. The proposition to distinguish between normal and revolutionary creativity is explored as a complementary view to other typologies on creativity.