Creativity remains a poorly defined construct within the sciences that study it. Creativity is not easily distinguished from intelligence, wisdom, ingenuity, insight, or intuition, all terms used to describe creative behaviours. Guilford's (1966) distinction between convergent and divergent thinking has perhaps had the most influential effect on how our understanding of creativity has developed. Convergent thinking leads one to arrive at a correct, conventional answer whereas divergent thinking involves generating many novel answers and solutions. Since Guilford, many other components have been included in our understanding of creativity. Here are some creative thinking abilities assembled by Bowd, McDougall, and Yewchuk (1994, pp 150-151):

• Fluency: The ability to produce many responses to an open-ended question or problem, such as "how many uses can you think of for a paper clip?"
• Flexibility: The ability to generate ideas that are unconventional, or to view a situation from different perspectives.
• Originality: The ability to produce unique, unusual, or novel responses, relative to one's reference group.
• Elaboration: The ability to add rich and elaborate detail to an idea, and to develop and implement it.
• Visualization: The ability to imagine and mentally manipulate images and ideas, so as to see them from different internal and external perspectives.
• Transformation: The ability to change one thing or idea into another, to see new meanings, applications, and implications of something already in place.
• Intuition: The ability to see relationships or make connections based on partial information.
• Synthesis: The ability to combine parts into a coherent whole.

In a number of studies, Robert Sternberg (1988) investigated how people distinguish between characteristics of creativity, wisdom, and intelligence. He first asked people to list characteristics they thought described someone who was creative, wise, or intelligent. From the list of characteristics generated through this procedure, he created a questionnaire which asked how characteristic each of the set of behaviours was of an ideally intelligent, wise, or creative individual. Result from his research showed that people have similar conceptions of intelligence, wisdom, and creativity. First he found that intelligence and wisdom are perceived as most closely related, intelligence and creativity as next closely related, and wisdom and creativity as least related. Higher amounts of intelligence were always perceived to accompany higher amounts of wisdom, or creativity.