Human creativity operates in many domains, including scientific discovery,technological invention, artistic imagination, and social innovation. Creativity requires cognitive processes such as combining ideas, generating hypotheses, and using analogies. It also requires social processes such as exchanging ideas and transferring emotional evaluations. This talk will examine the cognitive and social processes responsible for social innovation in six cases: Wendy Kopp with Teach For America, Cicely Saunders with hospices, Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook, Elizabeth Fry with prison reform, Millard Fuller with Habitat for Humanity, and Muhammad Yunus with microfinance. Dr. Thagard will outline models of how new methods are generated (procedural creativity), and of how cognitive and social processes interact to foster creativity.
