Creativity & Innovation – understanding the difference
Most people in organisations understand the need to innovate – to do new things and/or do things newly. They place a large amount of importance on being innovative and most consider that innovation is being creative. But they’re not the same thing and not understanding the difference often leads to a lack of innovation within organisations.
The key difference between the two is that creativity is about discovery – exploring what doesn’t exist and generating ideas. Innovation on the other hand is about taking those ideas and looking to implement them. In order to do so, you need to categorise, evaluate, implement and measure the ideas. Therefore creativity is not so much innovation but rather a part of the innovation process. It’s a prerequisite for any innovation as you can’t have new products or processes if you’re not thinking and acting creatively.
Now a problem arises because when you ask people if they consider themselves creative, in my experience, the overwhelming response is – no. The reason for this is that most people don’t understand what creativity is. Most people associate creativity with the arts – if you can’t sing, dance, paint, sculpt, act, or play an instrument then you’re not considered creative. Another reason is that people attribute creativity to different areas of their life – I’m creative when I do this but not when I do that. They’ll say that they’re creative when it comes to playing with their two year old but not good with coming up with ideas at the strategy meetings. What we need to appreciate is that creativity is not a luxury given only to a blessed select few but is like a muscle, and it’s one that we all have. But like any muscle, some people’s muscles are stronger than others. On the continuum, you can be more or less creative but as a human being, you can’t be not creative.
There are many ways to flex your creative muscle and you can be creative with time, relationships, space, environment, in the office, in the garden, in the kitchen, in the bedroom – you name it, you can do it! There was a study done to find out why some people in the organisation were creative and others weren’t. After weeks of tests they found the difference between the two was that those who were creative thought they were creative and those who weren’t creative, didn’t think they were. Which shows Henry Ford was right when he said “If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing – you’re right!” Being more creative than you are now simply starts with you affirming to yourself that you are creative. Realise that in the areas where you do feel creative, you can bring those creative thinking skills to all other areas of your life. Creativity is a muscle that can be and should worked out daily and you’ll find that you’ll increase the number of ideas you have.
This doesn’t mean that all your ideas will be good ones. Not at all. But you need to have an abundance of ideas before the innovation process of evaluating ideas takes place. Otherwise, you’ll never generate anything really new and just be doing minor tweaks on what already exists and calling it innovation. Start flexing your creative muscle in all areas of life and watch your capacity for innovation grow.