The structure of creative activity

The specifics of creative activity are considered. There are three phases of such activity: discovering a new knowledge domain (subject matter) and accumulating basic knowledge, mastering the knowledge domain, and mass productive use. The life cycle of creative activity is analyzed. As shown by the analysis, creativity is concentrated in the stage of goal-setting only. A qualitative model for mastering knowledge (experience) and a graph-theoretic structural model of a knowledge domain are proposed. New models can be developed, and well-known models can be used to describe and study each phase of creative activity, including those introduced by the authors earlier: in the first phase, optimal distribution models for the researcher's efforts between the tested hypotheses and optimal scheduling models for tested hypotheses; in the second phase, mathematical models of experience; in the third phase, structural and algorithmic models and optimization models.