Group creativity and the stages of creative problem solving

Everybody probably agrees that people like Einstein, Edison, or Van Gogh were extremely creative. Many people are fascinated with these creative geniuses, and a large psychological literature exists that aims to explain why some people are more creative than others (see, e.g., Simonton, 1999). As a consequence of this fascination with highly creative people, creativity is often conceived to be an individual-level phenomenon (e.g., the "lone genius"). Mumford and Gustafson (1988, p. 28), for example, define creativity as:. . . a syndrome involving a number of elements: (a) the processes underlying the individual's capacity to generate new ideas or understandings, (b) the characteristics of the individual facilitating process operation, (c) the characteristics of the individual facilitating the translation of these ideas into action, (d) the attributes of the situation conditioning the individual's willingness to engage in creative behavior, and (e) the attributes of the situation influencing evaluation of the individual's productive efforts [italics added].