Quantifying the Standard Definition of Creativity: A Weighted Geometric Mean Framework for Context-Sensitive Assessment

At the time of writing, the article 'The Standard Definition of Creativity' remains the most-cited paper in the _Creativity Research Journal_–one of the leading journals in creativity research–and has accumulated thousands of Crossref-indexed citations[1]. While the qualitative standard definition–requiring both originality and effectiveness–has achieved wide acceptance , translating this qualitative definition into a quantitative scoring rule has proven to be methodologically challenging: common additive models allow compensation between criteria, while simple unweighted multiplicative models impose rigid importance assumptions and can introduce score-compression artifacts. This paper proposes a weighted geometric mean as a practical scoring framework for product-based creativity, preserving the intended joint-necessity (“veto”) logic[2] while enabling context-sensitive weighting of component criteria. This weighted geometric mean framework is presented first as a two-component model combining originality and utility, and then generalized to an \(n\)-component formulation that can incorporate additional dimensions discussed in the literature (e.g., surprise, intentionality, authenticity) when warranted by evaluative goals. By separating (i) the definition of component indices from (ii) the weighting structure used to aggregate them, the proposed model offers a flexible, interpretable, and extensible approach to product-based creativity assessment across domains and contexts.