As an ability to generate unique ideas, creativity is a highly valuable skill. Nevertheless, being creative is not more important than being intelligent.
Creative ideas are essential for many fields, from business and economics to music, art, film, and television. Catmull (2009) states that intelligent people are more important than great, creative ideas. Generating new, unexpected notions and concepts helps advance society substantially. If creativity is viewed as an ability to produce ideas, it can be argued that it is not as vital as intelligence. Smart people further great ideas and bring them to life, and without them, many visionary concepts would not be achieved. For example, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had unique ideas for Apple. However, they would not be able to advance it without the help of other smart people, including specialists in business, marketing, and investment (Weinberger and Hartmans, 2020). Thus, it should be asserted that clever people are of greater importance than creative ideas.
Furthermore, intelligent people are often highly innovative and capable of generating compelling concepts. According to Shi et al. (2017), intelligence is a necessary condition for being creative. Although other factors are also crucial, including openness to experience and personality, low IQ rarely translates into inventiveness. Similarly, the threshold hypothesis suggests that above medium intelligence is a prerequisite for originality (Weiss et al., 2020b). Moreover, intelligence and creativity have many overlapping abilities and traits, including divergent thinking and openness (Weiss et al., 2020a). When analyzed in the context of the space-time continuum, both intelligence and creativity were found to overlap under conditions of tight space and loose time and tight time and loose space (Corazza and Lubart, 2020). This research demonstrates that the two concepts are interrelated, although one can function without another under certain conditions. Thus, as an ability to acquire and apply information and communicate them clearly, intellect is necessary for imaginative insights into many areas (Vestena et al., 2020). Overall, intelligent people are very capable of generating and developing creative ideas.
Reference List
Catmull, E. (2009) How Pixar fosters collective creativity. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Publishing.
Corazza, G. and Lubart, T. (2020) ‘Intelligence and creativity: Mapping constructs on the space-time continuum’, Journal of Intelligence, 9(1), pp. 1-27.
Shi, B. et al. (2017) ‘Relationship between divergent thinking and intelligence: An empirical study of the threshold hypothesis with Chinese children’, Frontiers in Psychology, 8, pp. 1-9.
Vestena, C. et al. (2020) ‘Intelligence and creativity: Epistemological connections and operational implications in educational contexts’, Creative Education, 11(07), pp. 1179-1200.
Weinberger, M. and Hartmans, A. (2020) Apple just became a $2 trillion company. Here’s how it came to rule the world, from its early struggles to beat Microsoft to the launch of the iPhone., Business Insider. Web.
Weiss, S. et al. (2020a) ‘On the trail of creativity: Dimensionality of divergent thinking and its relation with cognitive abilities, personality, and insight’, European Journal of Personality, 35(3), pp. 291-314.
Weiss, S. et al. (2020b) ‘A Reappraisal of the Threshold Hypothesis of Creativity and Intelligence’, Journal of Intelligence, 8(4), pp. 38-58.