The Importance of Separating Appropriateness into Impact and Feasibility for the Psychology of Creativity

Abstract

Scientific progress on creativity research depends on having properly operationalized measures. In psychological research on creativity, it is common to operationalize creativity as the combination of novelty and appropriateness. However, the operationalization of appropriateness varies widely across researchers, studies, and domains (e.g. technical goodness, significance, elegance, usefulness, and feasibility). We argue that a core distinction between impact (how useful an idea is for solving the problem) and feasibility (how easy it is to realize the idea) underlies the variation. We further claim that this distinction is both possible to capture reliably in practice and psychologically significant. To test these claims, 318 ideas from 5 real-world social innovation problems (e.g. improving accessibility in elections) were rated for novelty, impact, and feasibility by a set of six experts selected for each of the 5 challenges. We find that all three constructs can be measured reliably and are statistically separable. Further, we show that distinguishing impact and feasibility reveals theoretically meaningful patterns of relationships with key psychological processes of creativity – analogy and conceptual combination – that would be difficult if impact and feasibility were conflated. These results demonstrate the theoretical importance of separating appropriateness into impact and feasibility for the psychology of creativity.