Creativity was connected with the process of humanization of our earliest ancestors. Creativity has been helping human kind achieve today’s civilization. And creativity will play growingly important part in the development process of all people in the future.

Although there are many different, even contradictory opinions on creativity in general and on definition of creativity in particular. Most researchers have agreed on two major points of creativity concept : novelty and utility. So the working definition of creativity being used in this paper is formulated as follows :

Creativity is an activity leading to any thing (in the widest meaning) having both novelty (or newness) and utility (or usefulness) simultaneously.

Below the working definitions of problem, creative thinking and innovation will be given in this manner :

Before we have creative products we use in daily life (for example : goods, tools, devices, machines...), initially, creative ideas of these products emerged in the heads of their creators. In other words, human being’s creativity is associated with creative thinking. Many studies have shown that our brains work actually actively when we have problems to solve and/or decisions to make.

Problem (or Problem Situation) is a situation where a solver (or solvers) knows aim or purpose or goal to reach but

1. does not know any way to reach it or

2. does not know the optimum way to reach it among several known ways to reach it (i.e. decision making process)

Problems are very diverse and can be personal, collective, national, global.

Creative thinking is the thought process leading the solver (or solvers) to

1. knowing the way to reach his/her aim or purpose or goal or
1. knowing the optimum way to reach his/her aim or purpose or goal among several known ways.

We called this process creative thinking because there are both newness : from "not knowing" to "knowing" and usefulness : at last the desired aim or purpose or goal is reached (at least for the given solver).

After getting the solution to the given problem, the next step is to realize it in places where this solution is needed.

Innovation is a process of implementation converting both the potential newness and usefulness which are located within the solution into real ones to be accepted solidly by the given system

By the way, in our opinion, the problem can be considered as successfully solved only when its solution has been accepted fully by practice. More concretely, when all acceptors (or nearly all acceptors), potentially needing to use the given solution in reality already have used it as usual. In other words what we need is not creativity (innovation) for the sake of creativity (innovation) but for the sake of the problem being solved successfully in practice. In such case we will have a genuine development in reality.

Because creativity and innovation can occur in every area of human activities and life, creatology (creativity science) is a transdisciplinary and integrative science.

In Volume 7 of his "Mathematical Anthology" the Greek mathematician Pappos who lived around 300 A.D. first coined the term "heuristics". And although Pappos cited Euclid, Appolonius of Pergamos and Aristos the Elder as his precursors, the origin of heuristics - the science of making discoveries and inventions - is associated with his name. From the first the terms "discovery" and "invention" were given the broadest interpretation in heuristics. Discovers and inventors were taken to include artists, poets, politicians, military leaders, philosophers and others. Later many mathematicians including Descartes, Leinbniz and Poincare applied themselves to the problem of creating heuristics. Evidently, since it was denied the possibility of experimental development, mathematics felt the need for an instrument for solving creative problems earlier and more strongly than other sciences.

In the second half of the 19^th century research studies on the psychology of scientific and technological creativity began to appear. The status of deliberate and explicit research on the topic of creativity within the United States was pointed frequently to the presidential address given to the American Psychological Association by J.P. Guilford in 1950.

In 1950s and 1960s the field of creativity received a stimulus for the new development stage thanks to created practical methods or methodologies which allowed really to improve personal and collective creative abilities and these methods or methodologies could be taught and learned. (For example, brainstorming was created by Alex F. Osborn in the USA, algorithm of invention - by G.S. Altshuller in the former Soviet Union, lateral thinking - by Edward de Bono in the UK).

In 1954, Osborn founded the creative Education Foundation (CEF). A year later the first Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) was held at the State University of New York at Buffalo. CPSI (pronounced sip-see) has been an annual event ever since.

Through the work of Osborn the Center for Studies in Creativity (CSC) was formed at the Buffalo State College. An undergraduate curriculum was approved in 1974 and the graduate program - in 1975, and in November of 1994 the 100^th student earned a Masters of Science in Creativity and Innovation from Buffalo State College.

In the former Soviet Union (now the Community of the Independent States - CIS) Altshuller founded the Laboratory for Invention Methodology (LIM) in 1969, and collaborated with others to form the academic and research Institute of Inventive Creativity (IIC) which belonged to the All-Union Association of Soviet Inventors in 1971. Luckily, the current author was one of its first students.

In Cambridge, UK, Dr. de Bono founded the Cognitive Research Trust in 1969, and then the Center for the Study of Thinking.

Now it is very difficult to enumerate fully all centers or units working in the field of creativity and innovation in the world. But most of them are located in the Europe and Northern America. This statement is also true for creativity and innovation networks, associations, national, international conferences, professional journals and teaching programs on creativity and innovation.

There has been tremendous growth in the number and nature of national, regional, continental and international forms of networking, for example:
the American Association of Managers of Innovation, the American Creativity Association, the Canadian Creativity Network, the Danish Creativity Network, the Nordic Creativity Network, the PERISCOPE Group in the Western Europe (from which the European Association for Creativity and Innovation was formally established by notarial act on 27^th , October 1993), the PRISM Group in the Northern America, TRIZ Association was formed in the former Soviet Union in July 1989, the International Creativity Network connecting individuals on an international level.

Not only has the level of networking expanded, but also the number and kind of international conferences. The trend to have more than one or two main conferences a year continues.

Another very promising trend is the increase in number and quality of resources available in the literature. From 1967 to today, the creativity field has grown from one to four dedicated journals : 1) The Journal of Creative Behavior was issued in 1967, 2) Creativity Research journal - 1988, 3) TRIZ Journal - 1989 and 4) Creativity and Innovation Management journal - 1992. Except for that, highly respected journals within a variety of disciplines are now publishing articles and research on creativity and innovation. Only the Creativity - Based Information Resources created by the Center for Studies in Creativity contains over 5,600 annotations of periodicals, journals, assessment instruments, books, edited collections, software, theses and dissertations.

The term "Creatology" was suggested for the first time by Hungarian Istvan Magyari - Beck at the Conference on Creativity Research hosted by the Center for Studies in Creativity in August 1990. He proposes that creativity could be studied within a new, independent, cross-disciplinary frame work called creatology which is able to synthesize many different approaches to creativity and innovation that are currently isolated from each other. These approaches include sociological, psychological, economic, scientometric, management science, theory of organization, computer science, theory and history of art, humanities, and sciences. And there is agreement among leading scholars about the possibility and necessity of this kind of discipline.

Psychologists started to experiment with simple problems. It emerged that the experimenters solve problems by compiling a list of variants, that in this process much depends on their previous experience and that each variant considered transforms their view of the problems, etc. In other words, most people used to solve problems by the trial and error method. Such a method is quite suited to problems at the lowest levels of difficulty, where the number of possible variants is small. However, for problems at higher levels this method shows many disadvantages, some of which are as follows :

1. The number of ideas achieved per unit of time is few
1. The existing vector of psychological inertia prevents the solver from the right solution because it drives the mind to what is previously known.
2. The trial and error method wastes much time, thinking energy, material means and even human lives.
3. The trial and error method has no mechanism for directing the solver’s thinking towards the solution. This is the fundamental disadvantage of the trial and error method.

The problem solving process has several stages but, initially, many researchers had been focused their attention on the stage of how to generate the more the better creative ideas (divergent thinking). In the West there had been efforts to perfect the trial and error method such as brainstorming, check-listing, forced-relationships, morphological analysis, synectics using four analogies (personal, direct, symbolic and fantasy), lateral thinking’s techniques... and their modifications. Then, in order to enhance the effectiveness of creative thinking there have been created differing problem solving processes (programs) containing also convergent thinking for all stages of the problem solving process. Among these programs there are very
known ones such as Creative Problem Solving developed by the Center for Studies in Creativity in Buffalo (CPSB) and the five stages of thinking (To-Lo-Po-So-Go Process) by Edward de Bono.

In our opinion, practically, the mentioned above techniques, methods, methodologies have made the great contributions to overcoming, mainly, only the first three disadvantages of the trial and error method.

Among numerous works on creativity and innovation in former socialist countries there is the distinguished Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (Russian acronym is TRIZ). TRIZ is created by Genrik Saulovich Altshuller in the Soviet Union (now CIS), starting in 1946. TRIZ differs from "Western" methodologies mentioned above in finding the directing mechanism.

The TRIZ’s main ideas are as follows :

It is widely believed that creativity relates mainly to the subjective psychology of human beings. That is true but not enough. There is an objective side of creativity, and creativity can appear wherever evolution and development occur. If accepting that where both novelty and utility exist at the same time, there exists creativity, then reality has shown that creativity can happen at the place where subjective psychology of human beings is absent. For example, the evolution and development of biological systems made the appearance of bio-individuals, species more adaptable to their environment... and possessing new and useful abilities for survival and development. This is also creativity but human psychology does not take part in this process. It is only when human beings became creative subjects that psychology and human subjectivity participated in the creative process. The essence of the issue is that only those people who grasp the objective laws of evolution and development and manage this psychology (the subjective side of creativity) along them can achieve a high efficiency in creativity The objective side of creativity in TRIZ serves as a directing mechanism in problem solving and decision making. Thanks to this mechanism the solver can eliminate a considerable number of barren trials not coinciding with the solution’s direction. In the ideal case, if the directing mechanism can be built very exactly the solver can use only one trial leading to the solution. In fact this is the heart of the whole problem : one must be able swiftly to reduce the field of enquiry and turn difficult problems into easy ones. Human psychology has a concretely historical character and is not unchangeable. Though TRIZ takes into account present psychology, TRIZ also has the purpose of constructing a new psychology which will work in accordance with systems thinking, directed by objective evolution and development laws. At the present TRIZ contains eight such laws, Algorithm of Inventive Problem Solving (Russian acronym is ARIZ), 40 basic principles, 11 transformers, 76 standard rules, the Knowledge Base which collects strong scientific effects for making inventions at higher creativity levels. In recent years, there have been some new studies aiming at constructing greater theories based on TRIZ such as the Theory of Development of Technical Systems (Russian acronym is TRTS), the General Theory of Strong Thinking (OTSM) and the Theory of Development of Creative Personalities (TRTL).

In 1977 the first course on creativity methodologies in the whole Vietnam was conducted by the current author for students from differing departments of HoChiMinh City University. In April 1991, after some courses on creativity methodologies for students and large public audiences had proved to be successful, the administration of HoChiMinh City University permitted me to establish the Center for Scientific and Technical Creativity (CSTC).

By August 1996, we worked with more than 3,500 participants (86 courses in all including the basic and intermediate levels), among them high school and university students, workers, dressmakers, sport trainers, artists, pharmacists, physicians, engineers, lawyers, managers, scientists and so forth from all economic and social sectors. Their ages range from 15 to 72, education level from year 9 to Ph.D.,Professors.

Below I will outline some of our experiences derived from our activities.

1. There are many financial and other difficulties in Vietnam; everywhere money is needed. It is not easy to hope for funding from the state to perform our activities. We must first rely mainly on our forces, energy and enthusiasm to bravely enter a market. In other words, our Center has been working from the very beginning up to now as a self-supporting enterprise. We think, now the market has accepted us and our creativity methodologies program. Thus, we have been able to balance all our expenses during the process of growth of the Center.
2. The most important resource for every country is its human resource, and creativity is a human being’s fundamental resource, so our creativity methodologies program should serve a great number of people. So we have built our program not associated with any deeply specialized knowledge of sciences or technologies for the public at large.
3. According to a Vietnamese cultural tradition everybody should learn not for money but first of all for becoming a human being, that is, education and training provide students with not only knowledge but also helping them to be good people for their families and society. So our creativity methodologies program is carried out not for the sake of creativity only but we also concentrate our attention on ethic side of a creative personality.
4. Our creativity methodologies program has the purpose to help participants become using creativity tools in daily works and life. We have been convinced that only appropriate emotion can promote a human being to act in reality. So our program involves also examples, stories, exercises that may inspire such a emotion inside participants.

Our program emphasizes active participation and self-discovery. The participants make full use of self-study materials, instructor presentation, individual and group exercises and case studies. Throughout the program the participants have the opportunity to apply their newly gained knowledge, tools and skills in problem solving and decision making process. Audio and video equipment are used during the program.

Vietnam today has an income of 200 USD per capita. It is important for us to understand that if we want to spread creativity methodologies widely in our country, we should set a cheap fee for the course. Indeed, now the cost of the basic course lasting 60 hours and including textbooks is equivalent to 15 USD per participant. In spite of that we have a great satisfaction because we have such a strong desire to promote a development process in Vietnam.

Participants are very busy and diverse, so we cannot teach them for a long time and in one constant place. So we organize our courses at different times of the day, including evening courses. The Center also offers on-site training courses in and out of HoChiMinh City on request. Practically, we conducted some courses in Hanoi and Cantho.

Creativity methodologies is a new subject in Vietnam. Most people have not known about it, so we should foster its widest dissemination. In this connection, we provide introductory lectures, seminars, addresses on radio and on TV, schools, institutions, hospitals, companies, plants ... (many times free of charge) to describe the advantages of creativity methodologies. In addition to that, more than a dozen newspaper articles, written by correspondents about our creativity methodologies program, our Center’s activities and successes of past participants helped very much in this aspect.

Because of systems inertia in general and psychological inertia in particular a far new subject like creatology could be too difficultly accepted by people at the command of administration. In our case, creativity methodologies courses had been taught for the first period of time only to creativity lovers. After these courses have proved to be successful, they became compulsory for all students of the given institution. Thus, now, our courses have been integrated in the general program for all graduate students at several universities in HoChiMinh City.

For the present our research is focused not only on improving teaching and training methods, perfecting our creativity methodologies program where we have combined "Western", "Eastern" creativity methodologies and our culture but on elaborating on some topics to contribute to the development of this discipline in the world. By the way, I would like to say some words more about our program, although we teach at the same time the "Western" methodologies and TRIZ but we have devoted much time to TRIZ because of its very powerful advantages. Of the number of creativity methodologies that I have studied and used in work and daily life I like TRIZ best. But I suppose that to cope with the variety of this world, creativity methodologies need to be varied and it is necessary to let users have the right to select.

In spite of the obtained results, there are many points we would like to make better, for example :

• Our working facilities are poor
• Because of financial reasons we are forced to take on the average from 40 to 50 participants for every course.
• Teaching and training works at our Center are often overloaded so we lack in the time for summing up achieved results, writing new books and doing research.
• Process preparing teachers, trainers and researchers working in the field of creativity and innovation at our Center occurs very slowly, again because of financial difficulties. This has delayed us in opening regularly the courses on creativity methodologies of intermediate and advanced levels and building the courses for children and school students.

There are three areas : nature, society and thinking that should be understood and transformed by human kind during its history of evolution and development. Unfortunately, thinking had been receiving the least attention until recently. This disbalance between three mentioned above areas has served as a deep cause for a great number of tragedies at personal, group, even national and global levels. So, the emerging discipline - creatology - recognizing that creative thinking can be understood, nurtured, improved by the use of tools and controlled and making a lot of necessary efforts in these directions may be considered as the greatest but most overdue paradigm shift and revolution of the present century. Creatology will exert great impact on development in the 21^st century at large.

The contemporary challenges faced by us such as fast change, increasing complexity, diversity and competition lead to an increasing amount of problems at all levels. If "necessity is the mother of the invention " then there has been good stimulus for developing creatology. And in its turn, creatology with creative problem solving and decision making tools will convert these challenges into opportunities.

History books about the 19^th or the 20^th century economic development show that there were four ways to success. The first way was to have more natural resources than your neighbors; the second way was to be born rich and have more capital per person than your neighbors; the third way was to have better technology than your neighbors; and the fourth way was to be better skilled and educated than your neighbors. And if you had some combination of those four, you could be a successful individual, a successful business firm, or a successful country. "What is the key strategic variable that is left for you to deal with in the 21^st century?". Natural resources are going to move around the world, capital is going to move around the world, new process technology will move somewhat slower. What is left as the key strategic variable is the skills and education of the workforce. But what skills and what education we need for the future? There have been many studies on new skills of the future. Among enumerated skills in these studies we can read : creative thinking. American educator John Dewey wrote "The object of the education of children lies not in communicating the values of the past, but in creating new values of the future". So the education we need is creative education which educates all people (not only children) in creativity - the utmost humanness. Such a creative education should arm all people at all systems hierarchical levels with productive and effective mental tools for successfully solving problems and properly making decision in time. What will occur in the future if mankind cannot solve its problems? Writing on this point, I remember H.G.Wells’s notice : "Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe".

There are many definitions of human beings, one of them is that human beings are thinking creatures. But from possessing thinking ability to knowing how to think is a long distance. One of the main missions of creatology is bridging this distance. Creatology needs to educate and train people how to think and act creatively in order to govern development process to construct society which progressively become more humane and efficient. By the way, I remember William Drummond’s observation: "He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; he who dares not is a slave" and I want to add "He (or she) who knows how to think is a free and happy man (or woman). Creativity methodologies are often used to improve and perfect external systems, but in fact they can also be used and need to be used by human being to improve and perfect his (her) internal world. Thus, the quality of life for people is also enhanced.

We are only at the first stages of the information age but here many questions have arisen, for example, how to find relevant information in the information ocean, how to handle (process) information streams effectively, how to use information to produce new outlooks, concepts, ideas and knowledge needed for the scientific and technological revolution. Without creatology we cannot answer such questions

Creativity is the fundamental human resource. Like other resources, in order to exploit it much we should invent appropriate, productive and effective tools. "Tools" in creatology are creativity techniques, methods, methodologies... that in their turn will have enormous influence on the whole user’s awareness, attitude and responsibility. We can be optimistic with creatology because differing from other resources as ore, coal, oil and so on, creativity increases with utilization - it is endless resource.

We may dream of the time when will be a movement to eradicate "the illiteracy in mastering and using creativity tools" for every person, then, everyone, indeed, will be the REAL OWNER of his (her) LIFE and INNOVATOR making an active contribution to the common social progress.

To conclude this paper, I would like to quote some phrases that I love heartily :

"To give a fair chance to potential creativity is a matter of life and death for any society" (A. Toynbee).