The science of creativity and innovation, in plain terms.
Creatology is the science of creativity and innovation — understood not as two separate fields but as one continuous phenomenon: the generation of the novel and valuable through human cognition, and its passage into realised use.
The discipline was conceptualised in 1971 by the Creativeness and Inventiveness Project Team of the Philippine Inventors Commission, and first published on 24 October 1972 in Pamphlet I, Towards a Positive Understanding of Creativity, by Rafael Nelson M. Aboganda and the late Ricardo S. Cortez — a work dedicated to the United Nations.
Its founding proposition still opens the science today: “The dialectical creativeness of Man is a living reality.” Creativity, on this view, is not an individual totality but an organic, societal, and environmental unity — which is why the science studies it at four levels at once: the individual mind, the group, the organisation, and society.
