Creativity and Productivity

From the blog site, Knowing and Doing - Reflections of an Academic and Computer Scientist there is a post, Creativity, Productivity, Discipline, Flow, capturing the author's thoughts about a presentation done by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. In the presentation Csikszentmihalyi presented his model of the life cycle of ideas, particularly with regard to new ideas.

Per the notes:

The culture transmits information to people. Some people are happy to keep it at that, to absorb knowledge and use it in their lives. These folks accept the status quo.

The creative person, though, has the idea that he can change the world. He produces a novelty and pushes it out for others see. Only a small percentage of folks do this, but the number is large enough that society can't pay attention to all of the novelties produce.

A field of discourse, such as an academic discipline or "the art world", selects some of the novelties as valuable and passes them onto the culture at large with a seal of approval. Thus the field acts as a gatekeeper. It consists of the critics and powerbrokers esteemed by the society.

When there doesn't seem to be enough creativity for rapid change in a domain, the problem is rarely with the production of sufficient ideas but in the field's narrow channel for recognizing enough important novelties. I suppose that it could also come back to a field's inability to accurately evaluate what is good and what isn't. The art world seems to go through phases of this sort with some regularity. How about the sciences?

This would seem to work for books as well. Many books are written that are not published, many are published that are not sold, many are sold that are not remembered. What happens at each stage of the game? What are the variables that determine current and long term success?