What is the difference between innovation and creativity? An article from Harvard Business Review, named Innovation is not Creativity pointed out that creativity is about “coming up with the big idea”, while innovation is about “converting the idea into a successful business”. To quantify the effects brought by creativity and innovation, a survey was carried out targeting executives from Fortune 500 companies to rate their companies’ innovative skills from one to ten (one being very poor and ten world-class) and found out that companies were better generating ideas (with a score of six) than executing them (with a score of one). To evaluate the effects of focusing on creativity (generating new ideas) by moving the score from six to eight and of concentrating on innovation (executing ideas) by lifting the score from one to three, we could come up with these figures as follows:
Current capacity to innovation: 6 (current score of creativity) * 1 (current score of innovation) = 6
Anticipated capacity to innovation by increasing creativity: 8 (anticipated score of creativity) * 1 (assuming the score of innovation remains the same) = 8
Anticipated capacity to innovation by increasing innovation: 6 (assuming the score of creativity remains the same) * 3 (anticipated score of innovation) = 18
This is an interesting and vivid way of demonstrating the impact between generating ideas and putting them into reality. The sentence of "Innovation is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" said by Thomas Edison was quoted. The reason this sentence is so often quoted lies in the beauty of execution. Personally, I am a strong believer of “if you dream without doing anything to your dreams, you end up getting nothing”.
However, innovation is way more than execution. It means much more to a business. Jim Carroll is a great consultant for creativity and innovation. Check out his video below to see how creativity and innovation function as a propeller in the progress of a business and what that implies to your business. If you want more resources, I am always ready to provide more.
