Sif – a Swedish national trade union for white-collar workers in Industry – has recognized the importance of enhancing its service innovation processes through careful listening to its members. This article will discuss the Design Dialogue Group (DDG) methodology that has been developed through collaborative research between Sif and the Fenix Research Program, in order to enhance group creativity and organizational learning. The emphasis of this paper is restricted to the issue of enhancing group creativity, and literature and empirical data will be used in order to discuss the factors enabling and restraining creativity. The major assump-tion behind this study is that many factors behind group creativity can be controlled. Thus, a careful design of the group creativity process would increase the likelihood for success since measures to enhance creative behaviours and to avoid pitfalls can be planned and/or taken by a group moderator. In short, the aims of this study are twofold: (1) to relate prior research contributions to DDG experiences in order to augment our understanding concerning factors enhancing and threatening creativity in DDG settings and (2) to systematize these findings into a set of proposed design principles related to domain-relevant skills, creativity-related processes, and task motivation. These propositions concern the recruitment of participants,

A testing procedure used by J. W. Getzels and M. Csikszentmihalyi (1964) to gauge the relationship between problem finding and creativity in art students was employed in a study designed to determine if the same relationship existed in writers. Subjects were middle school students identified as either creative or noncreative by two separate measures and by their teachers. Eight creative and eight noncreative students identified in this manner were matched according to sex, grade, and IQ. Each student was asked to produce a piece of writing based on 15 objects placed on a table. ____e'Iy-we-re-told to use any or all of the objects and to arrange them as they wished. Two sets of evaluators judged the resulting writing On a variety of criteria, including the number of objects touched, the nature of the arrangement, the exploratory behavior exhibited by the subject, the amount of time spent writing, the total amount of time spent on the task, writing fluency, how the subject had changed the reality of the objects, and how their perspectives had changed. Results indicated that the creative students touched and. manipulated more objects, chose more unusual objects, spent more time prewriting, and seemed to see more relationships between objects as measured by changes in the object reality variable than did noncreative students. These findings suggest that the attempt to understand a deeper structure in the relationship among objects and in how they occur has an effect on the originality of writing. (FL) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

*The authors wish to thank Kathi Kephart for her assistance in scoring the creativity measures. In today’s dynamic society of changing standards and truths, creativity is increasingly becoming a human neces-sity. Creativity enables the individual to participate fully in the expansion of reality rather than be suffocated by it. Creativity is often considered to be the acceptance of di-verse and changing stimuli, as well as the recognition of novel associations among those stimuli. Carl Rogers (1976) defines creativity as &dquo;the ability to play spontaneously with ideas, colors, shapes, relationships-to juggle ele-ments into impossible juxtapositions&dquo; (p. 301). Similarly, Mednick (1962) sees creation as a bringing together of events that are remotely associated with each other. Be-cause of the complexity and irregularity of modern life, this ability to &dquo;juggle elements&dquo; is a desirable attribute for day-to-day coping. Many researchers and theorists have written of the importance of creativity for psychological health. The positive self-integrating force of creativity is presented by Kubie (1958) as an essential ingredient in mental health. He believes that only highly integrated persons can dis-organize and reorganize their thinking and behavior in accordance with changing life circumstances. Flach (1978) notes that in handling stress, a person is often required to change one’s perception about oneself or the situation one is in, and that this resilience &dquo;is the heart of the crea-tive process&dquo; (p. 11).). Society as a whole is benefited by the development of creative potential in its people. Creativity has been found to be a valuable trait in several occupations, including teaching (Blockhus, 1961) and business (Wallace, 1961). Increased understanding of creativity should lead to maxi-mized benefits. Stein (1962) notes that early identification.of individuals with creative capacities would enable them to be &dquo;selected for situations in which they could fulfill themselves and so contribute to the benefit of society&dquo;

Abstract: This study examined the reliability and validity of the CREA, a Spanish measure of divergent thinking, in an English speaking population. Data were collected across two years. During the first year, three forms of the CREA as well as the Verbal and Figural Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), the How Do You Think? (HDYT) inventory, the Runco Ideational Behavior Scale (RIBS), and the NEO were completed by a sample of United States college students across two sessions. In the second year, three forms of the CREA, the Verbal and Figural Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), and the NEO were completed by a sample of the same popula-tion during one session. CREA scores showed strong alternate form but moderately weak test-retest reliability. They correlated significantly and consistently with overall Verbal and Figural TTCT scores, and showed some significant but weak correlations with biographical inventory and extraversion scores, and no association with academic achievement scores. Results demonstrated convergent validity of the CREA with the TTCT,

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