Who Cares About Imagination, Creativity, and Innovation, and Why? A Review

Do researchers who study imagination, creativity, and innovation (ICI) explain to their audience why this topic is important, and if so, what reasons do they put forward? To answer this question, the present review examined a randomly selected sample of 200 empirical peer-reviewed articles published over the course of 3 years (2009-2012). The sample was stratified to include 50 articles in 4 disciplines (psychology journals, creativity journals, business or industrial/organizational psychology journals, and education journals). Across this sample of articles, ICI were treated as dependent variables most of the time, suggesting that scientists may be more interested in investigating what predicts ICI, rather than what ICI can predict. Approximately a third of articles examined did not explicitly address why researchers should care about ICI. Less than 10% included any type of substantive discussion of the issue. Qualitative analysis highlighted 9 main themes among the explicit reasons provided by researchers for studying ICI. Results varied according to journal types considered. Overall, findings from this review suggest that scientists may often assume that that their readers already share the implicit assumption that ICI constitute inherently valuable traits/behaviors, and thus pass up opportunities to explain why they think that ICI are important to study.