What do you think when I say the word creativity? Truth be told, creativity is having a bit of a moment.

There are thousands of books on the subject, many written in the past decade. It's become a corporate

buzzword right up there with innovation and disruption. It is at the center of a whole lifestyle

movement, online classes and Facebook groups and real life meetups. There are creativity coaches,

of course, and gurus offering to rearrange your life to add more creative space. So we hear at

Freakinomics Radio got to thinking, with so many people spending so much time and money and energy

in pursuit of this thing called creativity, well we wondered if there's anything systematic to be

learned about it. What if we started by simply defining the term? We asked a bunch of academics

who study creativity as well as some artists, some musicians, scientists, and inventors,

how do you define creativity? You know, it's actually harder than one might think.

What people use that word in lots of different ways to mean lots of different things.

There's a huge amount of what goes under the head and creativity that just has to do with

a willingness to stick to a problem and a pleasure in it. So starting with nothing,

having an idea, letting the idea pull you forward, getting it down, making it right.

Okay, bingo, this is how we're going to do it. It can't just be different for the sake of being

different because that's the definition of madness, I guess. Teresa Mobile is a psychologist and a

professor emerita at the Harvard Business School. She spent her career studying creativity,

particularly in education and work settings, but I asked her how is it even possible to empirically

study something as diffuse as creativity? Many people have the sense that it should not be studied

scientifically, that you should not try to apply science and objective thinking to the magic of

creativity, that it's somehow in the spiritual realm. As you might guess, I don't take that approach.

I think that it can be studied scientifically without destroying the excitement and the sense of

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