A science is constituted by its object of study. Creatology's object is creativity and innovation — understood not as two separate fields but as a single continuous phenomenon, from the generation of the new through to its realisation in use.
Creatology is the science of creativity and innovation — taken together as a single continuous phenomenon, and studied as the empirical object of one science. Within that object, creativity is the generation of the novel and valuable, and innovation its realisation, adoption, and diffusion into use: two phases of one phenomenon rather than two separate fields. It investigates the cognitive substrates that make creative thought possible; the operations through which creative thought proceeds; the pedagogical conditions under which creative capability can be developed; and the organisational and institutional systems through which creative cognition produces material consequence at scale.
Creatology is not creativity studies in the humanities sense, nor innovation management as a separate applied discipline, nor a sub-discipline of psychology or neuroscience. It is a bridge science that integrates findings from these foundational sciences around creativity and innovation, taken as one — a phenomenon none of them individually takes as its primary object. In this it follows the path of Behavioural Economics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and Climate Science, each constituted by an integrative object rather than a single method.
The discipline's founder is candid that Creatology has not been universally accepted, and that some social scientists have argued creativity and innovation cannot form a separate scientific object. The Institute engages this critique rather than avoiding it: the case for Creatology as a science is made on the evidence and against the demarcation criteria, and is presented as an active programme rather than a settled verdict.
The dialectical creativeness of Man is a living reality.— opening line of the 1972 founding pamphlet
