Introduction: Making it New: Finding contemporary meanings for creativity

Creativity is one of the important catchwords of the early 21st century. It is invoked by government, industry, and the academy, positioned as the motive force for economic and technological innovation, and widely claimed in the literature of business and organisational management as an explicatory concept and a key ingredient for success. It can be surprising to artists in all the many forms and modes of practice that a word we had long seen as ‘ours’ has so thoroughly and promiscuously slipped from our grasp. However, there is knowledge in all those other disciplines and domains that is potentially of value to creative writers, performing artists and plastic artists, as well as all our cousins in allied art forms.