Creativity is not enough

When a light bulb pops up in your head, that’s creativity. Innovation is the bit afterwards. The blood, sweat and tears. The bit when you turn that idea, creation or invention into something real, valuable and successful. It’s the evolution of creativity into success.

Inventor Thomas Edison is often said to have invented the light bulb, but in fact, he didn’t. What he did do was develop and implement the idea more successfully than anyone else. He was not the creator, he was the innovator.

You may measure success based upon your artistic integrity or popularity, or you might be best pleased by profits. Whatever; if you find success in creativity, you are an innovator.

Creativity is linked, inextricably, with innovation… Creativity is not enough.

It’s a chance to do good

Work fills a large part of our lives, so why not strive to do great work? We can do this by innovating; by changing things for the better.

Whatever we do, whether we are an artist, baker or businessman, some of us intrinsically want to do great work. Innovation is an opportunity to do this, by thinking differently and introducing new ideas. You may innovate in small ways, improving how you work or do business. Or you may change the world with a groundbreaking new invention. It doesn’t really matter; what matters is that you are doing good.

Doing great work, being successful, and changing things for the better. These are great things, and we can use innovation to help us do them all.

Size doesn’t matter

Innovation is big news; a profound transformation or a world-changing event. But it’s also a collection of small, incremental, seemingly insignificant changes. Changes that might go unnoticed by the majority but are nevertheless important to someone.

That someone might be you, doing your job. And even if innovation goes no further than your own four walls – if it makes your working life better, faster and more productive – it’s worth it.

Size only matters if you want to be big. If you are content to focus on the little things, innovation can still help you become more successful. Day in day out.

It’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it

You can journey to the same end point in many different ways. Innovation helps us find the best way. It helps us become better and faster than the way we did it before, or the way our competitors do it now.

Factory Records, the label that brought us Joy Division and The Happy Mondays, are renowned for their innovation. Not just in their music, but in the way they did things. Part of the reason for this is that Factory’s founders didn’t know how to run a record label – they just made it up as they went along. For a while this formula worked: they enjoyed great success, brought a new musical culture to the streets, and innovated in ways their competitors would later emulate.

The rest of us may not choose to disregard the rule book, but that doesn’t mean we can’t change the rules. Innovation is about rethinking, redefining and redoing. By challenging the status quo, we might just be able to do things better. In that process we create value and find success.

It’s an art becoming a science

Innovation is part art, part science, in that we do not fully understand its magic. Some people and businesses seem to be intrinsically better at it. But that doesn’t mean the rest of us can’t learn its craft.

More and more, individuals and businesses are picking apart innovation, to see how it really works, to understand how to measure, apply and master it. Experience, research and case studies continue to teach us more about how a myriad of factors such as diversity, collaboration, company culture and leadership are important to and influencing innovation.

Individuals and businesses that follow this increasing understanding of innovation will gain a competitive advantage over those that don’t.

A close relationship makes them both stronger.

If you believe that variety is the spice of life you may also appreciate the value of creativity. The creative process offers new things, ideas, experiences and ways of thinking. Without such influences, the world and its people may lack the diversity many of us crave.

Creativity and diversity are, it seems, close friends. But if creativity contributes to diversity, what does diversity give in return?

Richard Florida, US-based author of the best selling book ‘The Rise of the Creative Class’, believes that diversity is a more than worthy friend because its charms are valued by creative people, and as a result it has a positive effect on the creative process. Florida muses that “creative-minded people enjoy a mix of influences. They want to hear different kinds of music and try different kinds of food. They want to meet and socialise with people unlike themselves, trade views and spar over issues… More than anything, the creative class craves real experiences in the real world”.

Crucially, Florida believes that this appreciation of and exposure to diversity increases creative output. He goes on to provide statistics illustrating diverse cities and regions which tend to exhibit a proportionately higher creative output than non-diverse areas. Such observations suggest that diversity is not just a quality valued by creative people, it is a valuable contributor to creative output as well.

Breaking things down, we centre on three key arguments: First, diversity is valued by creative people. Second, diversity influences the creative process. And third, diversity can not just influence the creative process, but enhance it. If these arguments hold weight, it seems as though creativity and diversity share a close and potentially symbiotic relationship, mutually benefiting from each other’s influence.

As Woody Allen once said, “if you’re not failing every now and again, it’s a sign you’re not doing anything very innovative”. Woody is as creative as they come. But it wasn’t creativity alone that made him a film director, writer, actor, jazz musician, comedian and playwright. It was innovation – the process of turning creative new ideas into successful realities.

Innovation is oft described as a loser’s game, because new initiatives often fail. The trick, they say, is accepting and managing failure as a part of the innovation process. And when you fail, fail quickly.

Accept it

Failure is not good, but there is good in failure. Learning from failure can help make future innovations stronger. And for innovation’s sake, trying and failing is sometimes better than not trying at all.

Failure can be managed and thus minimised, but success is never guaranteed. Failure is therefore an intrinsic feature of innovation. Innovators should accept failure, and take value from it.

Manage it

Acceptance of failure does not mean failure should be welcomed. Big business may swallow the cost of failure, but the rest of us need to keep mistakes to a minimum – if only to survive. One of the biggest challenges for creative individuals and businesses is deciding which new ideas are most likely to succeed, and thus which ideas should be devoted time and resources.

Harold Sirkin, co-author of ‘Payback’, a book on innovation strategy, argues that “firms have too many ideas and too much emphasis on creativity – more ideas merely choke the funnel even more”.

Having too many ideas is not necessarily a problem, unless their development leads to too much failure. It’s therefore crucial to manage failure like any other risk. The transition from creativity to innovation (idea generation to implementation) is something to be closely managed.

For businesses, effective communication, leadership and decision-making help control and filter new ideas. For the lone individual, the filtering process may simply mean being pragmatic about how much time can be spent ‘chocking the funnel’ with new ideas. Either way, managing the move from conception of creative idea to innovative implementation helps avoid countless and costly dead ends.

Do it quickly 

If you accept failure but manage it to the point that it never happens, you are either incredibly successful, or you are pursuing fewer new ideas. That could ultimately stifle innovation. A happy middle ground: fail, but fail quickly. This approach lets individuals and businesses try new things, without losing too much time or money if things go wrong.

The problem: an innovator with a new idea can be like a dog with a bone. It’s sometimes difficult to let go. Niklas Savander, an executive vice president at Nokia, argues that innovators “need really harsh discipline to weed out ideas quite quickly”, and explains that Nokia “are working at fast failing, but are not there yet”. Failing fast is a challenge for even the biggest firms (and arguably, it’s easier for smaller, more agile entities).

Interestingly, the need to fail quickly brings us back to the need to accept failure in the first place. If failure is a dirty word, it’s going to be less easy to do quickly and comfortably. If it’s accepted as part of the innovation process, the act of giving up, learning from one’s mistakes and moving on becomes a less bitter pill to swallow.