Creativity, Innovation, and the Importance of Spontaneity

Spontaneity occurs when ideas or behaviours are expressed without evaluation. This lack of evaluation is the key to good idea generation. Some of the links include:

a) Large, quality idea pools are built up through a separation of creative thinking from critical thinking. If the people who wrote Red Riding Hood had realised the number of interpretations it has undergone and the various meanings attributed to the story, they may never have written it.

b) Creativity can be defined as the generation of a large number of ideas and a large number of novel and diverse ideas. Spontaneity, with its lack of evaluation, increases the number of ideas and the number of novel and diverse ideas.

c) A lack of evaluation reduces evaluation anxiety, removing blocks and increasing idea numbers and the number of novel and diverse ideas. If people are worried about being unoriginal then they produce less; if they