The European Council agreed in declaring 2009 the year of creativity and innovation. The Communication of March 2008 (European Commission, 2008a, 2) puts it simply: “Europe needs to boost its capacity for creativity and innovation for both social and economic reasons”. This paper aims at constructing a preliminary understanding of research on creativity and the possibilities of constructing a “creativity composite indicator” using large scale surveys and other existing statistical tools. The paper reviews some perspectives on creativity. Despite being a complex entity, difficult to define, there is certain consensus on some of the creativity characteristics. It seems clear that it is related to the appearance of something new and with some short of value. There is also certain agreement that everybody can be creative to some extent. A second part of the paper presents some existing measures of creativity. They are divided into psychological measures related to divergent thinking and personality traits and a “sector” approach to creativity. While the psychological approach is based in the more or less traditional psychometric models interested in individual level characteristics, the “sector” approach comes from a different set of disciplines more interested in creative aspects of society. The paper concludes raising some questions about the possibility of using existing large scale survey data, such as PISA, to construct a creativity index. It also indicates the necessary steps to implement a large scale assessment on young people’s creativity. These include: the development of a working definition of creativity by all interested stakeholders, the development of a framework and tool for measuring creativity and the application of pilot and full scale surveys.

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