ABSTRACT
The amusement park theory of creativity grew out of the “overlapping skills” or “varying gradient of generalizability” model discussed in the previous chapter. That rather vague initial model was, in turn, a response to the many ideas of the contributors to this volume. We have linked these ideas to data we have been collecting for 2 years about how people conceptualize creativity to create the amusement park theory of creativity. Although our data set is not yet complete-we eventually hope to factor analyze the responses of more than 2,000 subjects from a wide range of fields-what it has revealed thus far dovetails nicely with the combined ideas of experts writing about creativity in diverse domains. Our theory has been nourished from the ideas presented by the contributors to this volume, and we therefore thought it proper to present it for the first time here, although it is incomplete in some respects, as a kind of coda to the book. Because it remains a work in progress, this chapter is something of a promissory note for an evolving theory that we hope will become a useful addition to creativity theory.
