Content area
Full Text
Abstract: Innovation has become the mantra of the 21st century, a sort of panacea for every challenge the world encounters, be it in business, industry, economics or the society. It is widely acknowledged by the pundits and the practitioners alike, that creativity is an important ingredient for innovation. However, creativity and innovation seems to be used interchangeably by key decision makers in management today. A clear understanding of the common elements as well as the critical differences between these two is important for successful implementation of innovation.
This paper, part of an ongoing research, introduces a visual model for creativity-to-innovation process developed by the author earlier (Sathikh, 2010) and elaborates on the different ingredients that are needed for a successful outcome from this process.
Keywords: Creativity; innovation; modes of creativity; creativity to innovation process; visual model
1 Introduction
Amabile (1996) in the book titled Creativity in Context: Update to the Social Psychology of Creativity states that,
"All innovation begins with creative ideas. We define innovation as the successful implementation of creative ideas within an organization. In this view, creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the second."
This statement by Amabile helps establish a few important concepts. Firstly, creativity and innovation are unique by themselves, each distinguishable by their own set of characteristics. Secondly, creativity is a necessary starting point for innovation. Thirdly it is not sufficient to come up with ideas alone, but it is very important to successfully implement these ideas. While this concepts seem clear by itself, many of the literature on creativity and innovation use each other interchangeably, without understanding what each represent and is capable of, leading many a time to the notion that investing in creativity is good enough to bring about innovation. de Bes and Kotler (2012) points to how companies assume that, 'if people act or work in a more creative way, if they promote creativity, sooner or later, it will generate into greater innovation'. This leads to organisations spending lot more resources on training in creative techniques than to develop innovative functions according to de Bes and Kotler.
This paper sets out to outline the relationship between creativity and innovation...