CREATIVITY & INNOVATION

The word innovation has been defined from varied perspectives and in today’s competitive work environment is being given due recognition and emphasis, though not enough.

The people are to be motivated and an enabling environment has to be properly conceptualized and established.

Motivating people to innovate needs more than just financial incentive.

A fine balance between has to be maintained across incentives, recognitions, individual passion and organizational goals.

An important distinction has to be made between invention and innovation.

Invention is the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process.

 While innovation is the first attempt to carry it out into practice.

The classic definition of Innovation incude;

1. A creative idea that is realized
2. The successful exploitation of new ideas
3. A new idea, method or device
4. The capability of continuously realizing a desired future state
5. It is the process of making improvements by introducing something new
6. It is the act of introducing something new, or something newly introduced
7. It is the process of translating new ideas into tangible social impact
8. Introduction of something new
9. Staging of value
10. The conservation of value

The important issues:

1. In the long run the process of innovation dos add long term values.
2. Innovation does involve risk
3. But this process  may have negative or even destructive effects
4. The process ought to vigorously shakes old ways of doing work leading to emotive turmoil
5. The realization of personal and organization inadequacies to face changes have own peculiar negative connotations with fears
6. Leads to change organizational forms and practices
7. The key challenge is to maintain a balance
8. Product innovations and Process Innovations though  linked but need different set of skills

14 QUOTES ON CREATIVITY & INNOVATION

These quotes give a wide perspective to make few important points stand out and make the concept clear.

"There's a way to do it better—find it."

             — Thomas Edison

"Great is the human who has not lost his childlike heart."

              — Mencius (Meng-Tse), 4th century BCE

"When all think alike, then no one is thinking."

—    Walter Lippman

"Capital isn't so important in business. Experience isn't so important. You can get both these things. What is important is ideas. If you have ideas, you have the main asset you need, and there isn't any limit to what you can do with your business and your life."

—    Harvey Firestone

"It isn't the incompetent who destroy an organization. The incompetent never get in a position to destroy it. It is those who achieved something and want to rest upon their achievements that are forever clogging things up."

               — F. M. Young

"Doing the same thing over and over, yet expecting different results is the definition of crazy."

—    Unknown

"It's easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date."

            — Roger von Oech

"Creativity, as has been said, consists largely of rearranging what we know in order to find out what we do not know. Hence, to think creatively, we must be able to look afresh at what we normally take for granted."

—    George Kneller

"The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas."

—    Dr. Linus Pauling

"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought."

—    Albert von Szent-Gyorgy

"To raise new questions, a new possibility, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science."

             — Albert Einstein

Without the playing with fantasy any creative work has ever yet come to birth. The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable."

               — Carl Jung

"We shall not cease from exploration, and at the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

                 — T. S. Eliot

"Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking we can get on with creating the future."

              — James Bertrand