What makes the creative, creative? : a qualitative study about the creativity of creative directors

Abstract

Creativity is the process of conjuring novel ideas to accomplish a task or goal. This human feat is sought both at an organisational and personal level. Creative directors are meant to be enterprising thinkers that have an eye for detail and pertain an avid business sense. Their central goals are to come up with novel ideas that can carry a company’s brand, product, marketing, advertising, web or media development objectives. This qualitative study delves into the creativity behind Malta’s top creative directors; draw upon the rudimentary meaning of this phenomenon; how they experience creativity and what it means to them. The participants’ personal experiences emerged from this study have been presented as four master themes, ‘Motivation’, ‘Environmental Influences’, ‘Creative Management’ and ‘Holistic Creativity’. This study uncovers that the less popular qualitative understanding of the environmental influences in creativity are an important part of the puzzle within the body of literature on creativity, and can be explored more deeply through more qualitative research.