Quantifying the Standard Definition of Creativity: A Weighted Geometric Mean Framework for Context-Sensitive Assessment.

At the time of writing, the article 'The Standard Definition of Creativity' remains the most-citedpaper in the Creativity Research Journal–one of the leading journals in creativity research–andhas accumulated thousands of Crossref-indexed citations (Runco & Jaeger, 2012). While thequalitative standard definition–requiring both originality and effectiveness–has achieved wideacceptance , translating this qualitative definition into a quantitative scoring rule has proven to bemethodologically challenging: common additive models allow compensation between criteria,while simple unweighted multiplicative models impose rigid importance assumptions and canintroduce score-compression artifacts. This paper proposes a weighted geometric mean as apractical scoring framework for product-based creativity, preserving the intended joint-necessity(“veto”) logic (Simonton, 2018) while enabling context-sensitive weighting of componentcriteria. This weighted geometric mean framework is presented first as a two-component modelcombining originality and utility, and then generalized to an 𝑛-component formulation that canincorporate additional dimensions discussed in the literature (e.g., surprise, intentionality,authenticity) when warranted by evaluative goals. By separating (i) the definition of componentindices from (ii) the weighting structure used to aggregate them, the proposed model offers aflexible, interpretable, and extensible approach to product-based creativity assessment acrossdomains and contexts.