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This article examines the emergence of the notion of creativity in American management thought and the major stages in the evolution of the representations related to it through a corpus study of the Harvard Business Review (HBR). This influential journal magazine offers a patriotic, sometimes biased, forum to debate creativity. After setting the context for the emergence of this notion in post-war America, explaining the centrality of individual creativity traits and the infatuation with its psychological dimension, we propose a detailed analysis of the three major periods of creative thinking that we discerned during the HBR analysis for the period 1922-2018.