Rewarding and Promoting Creativity

Awards and prizes are designed to encourage creativity. They help stimulate and promote it among professionals and members of publics-at-large. This article focuses on ex-post accolades. It argues that, although these honours promote old and new approaches to creativity, it is the old approaches that tend to dominate in the international ex-post reward system, especially in the sciences. The Nobel Prizes, and particularly the Nobel Museum, serve as the article’s case study, with an analysis of the exhibition Cultures of Creativity illustrating its argument