Author: Chen Wen-ling / Publisher: PsyGarden Publishing (courtesyof PsyGarden Publishing)

In Stan Lai's Creatology, published in mid-2006, renowned director Stan Lai shared with readers his wealth of experience working in theater. The book, which the publisher called "the first practical handbook to break creativity down into rules and steps," inspired enthusiastic discussion of so-called "creatology."

In September, in the midst of this discussion, Chen Wen-ling, who wrote Father and Red Rose and has taught "creativity" for 16 years in the Department of Advertising at National Chengchi University, published Project Insight and Creativity Tool Box, which bookstores have been shelving among their works on creativity. Readers who pick up these two volumes purely to learn about creativity will probably be disappointed. But other pleasures are to be found within their covers.

Some people consider creativity simply a tool for success. Such a definition is readily understood and is easily used as a motivator. It has its origins in the "creatology" of 1940s America and Japan and has become a commonplace. Since the 1970s, more than 200 masters' theses and doctoral dissertations in Taiwan alone have taken creativity as their subject matter. Though creatology came late to mainland China, it has boomed there as well. Since it arrived there in the early 1980s, mainland scholars have produced more than 300 monographs on the subject.

Creatology has taken hold in the fiercely competitive corporate world as well. We live in an age in which success depends upon constant innovation and the rapid discovery of new ways to entice consumers to buy. As corporations strive to meet the ever-changing appetites of the market and make themselves stand out from the crowd, creativity has become more than just a watchword--it is the flash of brilliance for which everyone, boss or employee, blue-collar or white, yearns.