Between Eminence and Arts and Crafts: The Pro-C Level of Creativity

When we hear the word creative, we tend to picture one of two people (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2013).

At one extreme is the genius: Picasso inventing Cubism, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist changing how we understand the universe, or a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist whose work becomes part of literary history. At the other extreme is the creative person we know. The friend who paints. The colleague who takes beautiful photographs. My mother turning a Mason jar into a lamp.

Both are creative. But there is an enormous amount of creativity between those two extremes. And, particularly for leaders and people working in organizations, that middle ground may be the most important.

Creativity is typically defined as the generation of ideas or solutions that are both novel and useful for the problem or challenge at hand, particularly when that problem is ambiguous, complex, or ill-defined (Mumford, 2003). But those problems can vary enormously. Sometimes creativity means figuring out how to fix something at home with whatever happens to be in the garage. Sometimes it means developing a new approach to a difficult client problem. Sometimes it means designing a product that creates an entirely new market. And, occasionally, it means solving a problem that changes an entire scientific field. All involve creative problem-solving. They simply involve it at different levels.

That is the idea behind James Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto's Four-C Model of Creativity: mini-c, little-c, Pro-c, and Big-C (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). The framework was developed partly because dividing creativity into everyday little-c creativity and eminent Big-C creativity leaves an enormous amount of creative activity unexplained. Mini-c captures the creativity inherent in learning and personally meaningful discoveries, while Pro-c captures the developmental progression toward professional-level creative expertise.

Importantly, these shouldn't be thought of simply as four boxes separating four kinds of people. They also help us understand different manifestations and levels of creativity and how creative development can unfold over time. After all, even a Nobel Prize winner once had to complete a fourth-grade science project. And that project did not win the Nobel Prize.

The Big-C We All Recognize

It is Nobel Prize season, which means we have spent several weeks of watching newspapers, television, radio, and social media celebrate some of the world's most innovative thinkers. And the 2026 prizes provide extraordinary examples of the kind of creativity we easily recognize.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel received the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics. What makes their story especially interesting from a creativity perspective is where part of it began: trying to understand how a single cell alga is able to swim toward a light source. Discoveries involving light-sensitive proteins eventually helped give neuroscientists a remarkable tool for switching particular nerve cells on or off using light, radically expanding researchers' ability to investigate causal relationships in the brain (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2026). Think about the distance between those ideas for a moment. Algae. Light-sensitive proteins. Neurons. Behavior. The human brain. Things that, at first glance, do not seem to belong together ultimately became connected.

Then there is Francis Halzen, recipient of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin. His fundamental insight sounds almost absurdly simple when reduced to a sentence: What if we could use Antarctic ice to detect particles coming from the universe? The resulting IceCube observatory uses a cubic kilometer of Antarctic ice equipped with light sensors to detect evidence of these elusive particles (Nobel Prize in Physics, 2026).

But ideas such as these did not become historically important simply because they were unusual. They had to be developed. Tested. Improved. Implemented. Evaluated by other experts. And, ultimately, they had to produce something consequential. That is the territory of Big-C creativity, the kind associated with eminent accomplishments that meaningfully influence or transform a domain (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009).

Researchers have been fascinated by these people. Simonton (1997), for example, spent decades investigating eminent creators, creative careers, productivity, and the factors that help explain extraordinary creative achievement. Importantly, this work also shows that creative career trajectories vary across individuals and domains rather than following one universal age curve. My colleagues Joseph Stewart, Josh Chappel and I are also studying the early-life experiences of eminent figures, looking for the events and patterns that shaped their paths (Stewart et al., ongoing).

There are good reasons to study people capable of this level of creativity. Big-C creators provide a North Star for what human creativity can accomplish. But they also create a problem. If Nobel laureates and Pulitzer winners become our mental prototypes of creative people, most of the creativity occurring around us becomes invisible.

The Little-c and Mini-c Moments We Tend to Miss

Let's return to my mother and her Mason jar. She needs to finish an important cross-stitch piece by the next day, but the living room is too dim to see the details clearly. There’s no time to run out and find a better lamp. Looking around at what she has available, she spots an old Mason jar and realizes she can turn it into one. She isn't going to win a prestigious design award for it, nor is she transforming the field of industrial design. But she has still produced something novel and useful within the context in which she is working.

That is little-c creativity: the recognizable creativity of everyday life (Simonton, 2013). It includes the clever meal made from whatever was left in the refrigerator, the portrait painted in a weekend art class, the unusual Halloween costume, or the improvised solution to a problem around the house.

But creativity can become smaller still. Imagine someone taking that painting class for the first time. They are trying to create a particular color and begin mixing paints. Suddenly they discover that combining particular amounts of red and green produces exactly the shade of brown they wanted. They haven't discovered a new principle of color theory. But they didn't know it before.

That is the insight behind mini-c: the personally meaningful interpretations and discoveries that occur as people learn (Beghetto & Kaufman, 2007). Beghetto and Kaufman explicitly describe mini-c as creativity inherent in the learning process. Mini-c therefore reminds us that creativity doesn't begin with a masterpiece. It can begin with learning, experimenting, noticing something, or making a connection that is new to us. So now we have the Nobel Prize on one end and the Mason-jar lamp and painting class on the other.

But surely there is something between experimenting creatively with a new hobby and changing the course of history. There is. And that missing middle may be the form of creativity that organizations should care about most.

Pro-c: Where Much of Workplace Creativity Lives

Think about the people around your organization who are really good at what they do. The engineer who has spent 15 years working with a particular technology and sees a solution the rest of the room missed. The consultant who encounters a client problem that doesn't quite fit any existing framework and develops a different approach. The researcher who connects two previously separate literatures into a new study. The product manager who notices that customers are using a product differently from how it was designed and sees an opportunity to build around that behavior. The physician who modifies an existing procedure. Or a novelist who consistently produces books read by large audiences.

These people aren't beginners experimenting with a new hobby. They possess substantial domain knowledge and expertise. They can produce work that would be extremely difficult for someone without years of experience in that domain to produce. But they also haven't necessarily transformed their entire field.

Welcome to Pro-c creativity.

Kaufman and Beghetto introduced Pro-c specifically to capture this territory: the developmental and effortful progression beyond little-c that produces professional-level creative expertise without necessarily reaching Big-C eminence (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). And herein lies the piece of this framework I think matters enormously for organizations:

Somewhere between the Nobel Prize and the Mason-jar lamp is the type of creativity that keeps organizations innovating. Organizations do not need their employees to win Nobel Prizes to innovate. They need engineers who see a better way to solve engineering problems. Researchers who recognize unexpected patterns. Nurses who improve procedures. Designers who question assumptions about users. Managers who develop better workflows. Consultants who adapt existing approaches to unusual client problems. Teams that connect existing knowledge in ways their organization hasn't tried before.

In other words, organizations depend heavily on people who have developed enough expertise to produce something meaningfully new and useful within their professional domain. That is Pro-c.

Becoming Professionally Creative Takes Time

Pro-c doesn’t usually appear overnight. It develops through accumulated domain knowledge, experience, practice, mistakes, feedback, and increasingly sophisticated understandings of a field. Research on expertise has long emphasized this. The influential work of Ericsson and Charness (1994) argued that exceptional performance emerges through prolonged efforts to improve, particularly through forms of deliberate practice rather than experience alone.

And that distinction between experience and continued development matters. Simply doing the same job for many years does not guarantee increasing expertise. Ericsson (2006) later emphasized that many professionals eventually reach an acceptable level of performance and stabilize there, whereas continued improvement requires deliberate efforts to change and improve particular aspects of performance. The same principle is useful when thinking about professional creativity (Ericsson, 2014). Expertise gives creators raw material. Over time, professionals accumulate examples, patterns, failures, techniques, constraints, and knowledge that can be combined in increasingly sophisticated ways.

Not every one of those combinations has to reinvent a profession. Sometimes Pro-c creativity means making something that already exists meaningfully better. Sometimes it means applying an existing technique in an unexpected context. Sometimes it means connecting ideas that have traditionally been treated separately. Sometimes it means recognizing a problem that others have become accustomed to accepting. And occasionally, a professional pushes an idea so far forward that the contribution itself begins challenging the prevailing paradigm.

That last possibility reveals something important about the boundaries between Pro-c and Big-C. Sometimes we don't know which one we are looking at yet. Big-C is partly a judgment that fields and history make about work after its consequences become visible. Kaufman and Beghetto (2009) themselves note how difficult it can be to identify the precise point at which someone transitions into Big-C. Halzen didn't wake up in October 2026 and suddenly become capable of Big-C creativity because a Nobel Prize was announced.

The work came first. The eminence came later.

One Person Can Occupy More Than One C

This brings us to another misconception the Four-C model helps correct. Reaching an eminent level of creativity does not mean that everything you subsequently produce is eminent.

A Nobel laureate doesn't wake up every morning producing historically significant ideas before breakfast. Even within their area of expertise, they may learn something new that is personally meaningful, solve a relatively ordinary problem, improve an existing method, or develop a strong professional idea that moves their work forward without transforming the field. The occasional Big-C contribution exists alongside plenty of creative activity at other levels.

And the reverse is important, too. Someone who would never describe themselves as an eminent creator may occasionally produce an extraordinarily creative professional solution. The level of creativity, then, does not reside permanently within the person. It also depends on the idea, activity, or product being produced.

So rather than using the Four Cs simply to label people as a little-c creator, a Pro-c creator, or a Big-C creator, we should also pay attention to the level of creativity represented by what they are actually producing. That distinction has important implications for anyone trying to lead creativity.

So, Why Should Leaders Care About Any of This?

A model with four catchy labels isn't particularly useful if it changes nothing about how we lead. The real value of the Four Cs is that they force us to reconsider several assumptions organizations may make about creativity.

1. Stop asking who "is creative"

Listen closely to how people describe their teams and you will hear this distinction constantly.

"She's one of our creative people."

Or:

"He's very analytical. Not really the creative type."

The Four-C model should make us suspicious of those labels. Creativity at work does not always look like someone developing a breakthrough idea or reinventing how the organization operates. An employee might be learning a new skill that opens the door to different kinds of projects, figuring out a better way to track the team's performance, adapting an existing process to an unusual problem, or developing a small improvement that makes everyone's work a little easier. These contributions reflect different levels and forms of creativity, even if none will transform a profession.

And, as we have seen, the same employee can produce creative work at different levels. A routine solution today does not determine the level of the next idea, nor does one highly creative contribution permanently make someone a "creative person."

For leaders, "Which of my employees are creative?" may therefore be the wrong question. A better question might be: “Where is creativity already occurring on my team, at what level, and what would allow more of it to emerge?”

That is a very different way of seeing the people we lead.

2. Don't demand Big-C when Pro-c is exactly what you need

Organizations love words like breakthrough, disruption, transformation, and game-changing. But imagine actually running an organization in which every employee spent every day attempting to overthrow the existing paradigm. It would be chaos.

A lot of organizational innovation depends on smaller professional advances: a better process, a different application of an existing technology, an improvement to a product, a new way of approaching a customer's problem, or a connection between ideas that previously lived in different parts of an organization.

Those achievements may never appear in a history book. They can still create enormous organizational value. Big-C gets remembered. Big-C gets remembered. Pro-c gets work done.

For leaders, the takeaway is to be clear about the level of creativity a problem actually requires. Innovation does not always mean transformation. Sometimes the most valuable creative contribution is simply finding a meaningfully better way to do something.

3. Bring deep expertise and fresh perspectives together

Expertise matters for creativity. People who have spent years working in a domain accumulate knowledge about what has been tried, what works, what tends to fail, and where the difficult problems are. That knowledge provides valuable raw material for Pro-c creativity.

But expertise can also make certain assumptions harder to see. Someone newer to a field may ask a question that seems obvious, challenge a practice everyone else has learned to accept, or make a connection that experienced professionals overlook precisely because they know how things are "normally" done. Neither perspective is inherently more creative. They bring different resources to the creative process.

For leaders, then, the goal should not simply be to put the most experienced people together when a problem requires innovation. Bring deep expertise and fresh perspectives into the same conversation. The experienced employee may know which ideas are feasible and how to develop them; the newcomer may be more willing to ask why the organization is doing something that way in the first place.

That interaction can be a powerful source of creativity.

4. Don't just label someone's C. Help them develop it.

Perhaps this is my favorite implication of the model. The Four Cs turn creativity from an identity question into a developmental one. Instead of:

“Am I creative?”

we can ask:

“Where is my creativity now, and what would help me develop it further?”

Mini-c insights can become little-c activity. Continued experimentation, learning, feedback, experience, and expertise can support movement toward professional creative accomplishment. Pro-c creators may continue producing sophisticated professional contributions, while a very small number eventually produce work judged by their fields as Big-C.

That progression isn't automatic, nor does everyone need to aspire to the next C. Nevertheless, it changes the leadership question. Rather than simply identifying the team's "creative stars," leaders can think about what people need to develop: opportunities to learn, better feedback, exposure to different perspectives, cross-functional collaboration, permission to experiment, appropriately challenging problems, or opportunities to develop deeper expertise. The goal becomes developing creativity rather than merely discovering people who already demonstrate it.

Creativity Is Bigger Than Genius and Smaller Than We Think

For now, the Four-C model leaves us with a simpler lesson. Creativity is happening when someone changes a scientific field. It is happening when an experienced professional finds a better solution to a problem at work. It happens when someone turns a Mason jar into a lamp. And it may even be happening when a fourth grader discovers, for the first time, something every scientist in the world already knows.

Those accomplishments should not be treated as equivalent. But neither should we assume that only the first one deserves to be called creativity. Big-C shows us what creativity can ultimately accomplish. Mini-c and little-c remind us where creative development can begin. But for those of us trying to lead innovative organizations, Pro-c may be where we should spend far more of our attention.

Because somewhere between a fourth-grade science project and a Nobel Prize lies an enormous amount of creativity. And that is where most organizations innovate.