Engineering Creativity: The Influence of General Knowledge and Thinking Heuristics

Belski et al. revisit the Amabile’s model of creativity and propose to append its components in order to describe engineering creativity more accurately. Analysing the outcomes of numerous idea-generation experiments, they conclude that in order to adequately explain creative performance of engineers, the ‘knowledge outside profession’ component (i.e. ‘general knowledge’) needs to be added to classical components of creative performance. Reflecting on the outcomes of idea generation experiments, the authors conclude that ideation heuristics can effectively facilitate the use of this ‘general knowledge’ component.