Chapter 3 marks the point at which the book begins to integrate its two core constructs – entrepreneurship and artificial intelligence – by examining how AI reshapes the first stage of the entrepreneurial process, that is, innovative entrepreneurial ideas. The chapter analyses whether and how AI can be considered creative, and whether its increasing predictive power may (or may not) commoditize creativity and narrow the space for genuinely novel ideas. In fact, the analysis examines how AI affects different modes of human thinking, distinguishing between convergent and divergent creativity. In this context, the chapter argues for the continued relevance of human divergent thinking and for the importance of hybrid or symbiotic forms of human-AI intelligence. A central distinction is subsequently drawn between Kirznerian entrepreneurial ideas, which stem from market inefficiencies and unmet needs, and Schumpeterian ideas, which are more radical and disruptive. The chapter argues that the scope for Kirznerian ideas may shrink as incumbents acquire predictive advantages through AI, while the space for Schumpeterian ideas may expand due to the generative capabilities of AI systems. Importantly, the chapter highlights that creativity is not confined to generative AI alone: predictive AI can also display creative potential by identifying non-obvious patterns.

This chapter explores the relationship between free will and creativity, asking whether genuine creativity – and the praise and blame that often accompany artistic achievement – requires belief in free will. While philosophical discussions of free will have traditionally focused on moral responsibility, the author argues that creativity is another domain where questions of agency, authorship, and desert arise. Drawing on insights from philosophers such as Paul Russell and Robert Kane, the chapter examines the idea that artistic creation involves a unique form of self-expression, one that is often seen as a reflection of the agent’s freedom and self-authorship. Some thinkers argue that creativity demands the ability to be the ultimate originator of one’s work. The author challenges this view, showing that talent development, creative output, and artistic success are all deeply shaped by factors beyond our control – such as genetic endowments, social circumstances, and access to resources. While creative acts can still be meaningful and admirable, the chapter argues that they do not justify basic desert. Instead, creativity is better understood as a flourishing of human potential rather than a ground for moral praise. Free will skepticism, far from diminishing creativity, encourages humility, gratitude, and a more realistic appreciation of the social and biological scaffolding that makes creative achievement possible.

War has a complex relationship to creativity and the arts. War is a mythic and hallowed subject of art, where it is often depicted in sacred terms as the testing ground of foundational leaders and the cauldron from which societies emerge. Yet based as it is in killing and destruction, war damages both society and creative faculties. War ends lives, destroys cultural treasures, disrupts artistic careers, and wreaks havoc on social networks through which artists develop and share work. War’s violence inflicts physical and psychological disabilities that limit creative expression. Those negative impacts can, paradoxically, spur creativity: war experience pushes artists to invent new forms of expression and has led to whole artistic movements (such as Surrealism). War also leads to creative interventions in fields like medicine, technology, and communication. War also changes how societies conceptualize creativity itself. “Creativity” emerged as a social scientific concept during World War II and became an important area of Cold War investigation, one cultivated to impart competitive edge. Creativity research will continue to deepen our understanding of how humans make and survive war.

This chapter examines creativity as a cognitive, social, and motivational process that involves divergent idea generation and convergent refinement. It contextualizes generative AI within the long history of technology shaping art, from Renaissance science to modern algorithmic art. Through cases such as AARON and MidJourney, the authors question whether AI creativity is “real” or an illusion shaped by anthropomorphism. They highlight how motivation, childhood development, and organizational culture shape creativity, and how AI can act as collaborator, accelerator, or threat depending on its use. Ultimately, human–AI co-creativity is positioned as both an opportunity and a challenge for redefining authorship and innovation.

Chapter 8 investigates the complex relationship between online offensive language and creativity. We demonstrate how creativity extends beyond literary contexts to everyday online interactions. The chapter showcases a vast array of creative tools that are used to cause offence and attests to the fact that while creativity could be enriched by the resources available on various online platforms (e.g., memes and emojis), written language remains central to creative communication. We demonstrate how creative language tools categorised under, for example, tropes, figures of diction and figures of thought, help the offender construct remarks that target sensitive aspects such as appearance, race, gender and personality. We also argue that creative language functions on multiple levels, with its interpretation often requiring a pragmatic layer that extends beyond simple word recognition.

When Elizabeth Maconchy entered the British compositional scene in 1930 with the premiere of her orchestral suite, The Land, she and her fellow composers had an unsettled relationship with the prevailing musical styles of Europe. Whereas continental composers were highly regarded by British critics as cutting edge, their British contemporaries were faulted as derivative, unoriginal, and too steeped in national traditions to contribute to the ‘new’ music. Constant Lambert argued his rival countrymen (and women) had let their moment to be ‘modern’ pass them by. This chapter examines the scope of modernism on the continent and scholars’ difficulties in pinning down a precise functional definition of the so-called ‘modernist’ style. Practitioners of European modernism sought to be sensational or at the very least individual. British modernism, on the other hand, tended toward the juxtaposition of ‘old’ and ‘new’, an eclecticism that is not bound to any specific ideology.

Emerson’s aesthetics addresses fundamental philosophical questions on the reality of beauty, experience, and the nature of art and creativity. A central thread running throughout his aesthetic views is the love of beauty, which celebrates a felt appreciation for the diverse beauties found in nature and society in and for themselves. The experiential self as it exists in a connatural relationship with its surroundings has the potential to enjoy such deep folds of qualitative significance. Emerson, moreover, theorizes the existence of an absolute form of beauty having a metaphysical primacy. Beauty exists as the ultimate ideal of human conduct and thought and as the primordial ground or first cause of the universe. In this aesthetic cosmology, art through its imaginative symbolic appropriations of its environment shares in the greater metamorphic processes of a creatively polyphonous and open universe.

The link between creativity and serious mental illness (SMI) is widely discussed. Jackson Pollock is one example of a giant in the field of art who was both highly creative and experiencing an SMI. Pollock created a new genre of art known as abstract expressionism (“action painting”) defined as showing the frenetic actions of painting. The question arises whether his SMI playedany role in the way he created his drip paintings, especially when he was overactive and manic. Furthermore, did visual hallucinations or enhanced visual perception associated with mania or psychosis facilitate Pollock in embedding and camouflaging images under layers of thrown paint? Seeing images in Pollocks drip paintings has been a controversy ever since these paintings were created. Some experts attribute this to pareidolia—perceiving specific images out ofrandom or ambiguous visual patterns—a phenomenon known to be enhanced by fractal fuzzy edges such as seen in Rorschach ink blots as well as in Pollock drip paintings. So, are Pollock’s drip paintings merely giant Rorschach images, or did Pollock insert polloglyphs—images that are encrypted that tell a story about Pollock’s inner being—into his paintings and then disguise them with drippings? Here, we explore answers to these questions and discuss images that Pollock included in his earliest sketches and used repeatedly in his abstract paintings and later in his drip paintings to argue that these images are not accidental.