It always amazes me that people think that by spending a selected period of time observing creativity they can throw out theories. Expertise can not be gained from just observing, you have to be in the field making mistakes. The moment one puts a formula or a system to to something, we create pattern and once pattern sets in creativity and later innovation stops.

Some might say this is a contradiction as I’m one of the founders of Idea Engineering, however we always stress to our team that we are creating a process that is flexible to change and evolution. We are always react to new information and knowledge.

Some points to consider on how creativity plays a vital role in innovation, please see below

1. Imagine that innovation is getting from Florida to California, idea is the vehicle and creativity is the fuel ( fuel that is composed of imagination, empathy and observation). How can you say that one is more important than the other? Or that you abandon one for the other? If one is to succeed one has to keep putting fuel in the car, select an appropriate vehicle (you wouldn’t select a beat up car as it would never get you there) and one has to keep the big picture of getting to California in front of us.
2. By always keeping all the elements working at once, one stays incredibly agile. One may decide to cut through Colorado to void bad weather, or change vehicle for the last leg of the journey, and keep adding quality fuel. Never stop observing, creating, and reacting to keep implementation relevant. The last thing you want is to California and realise that ‘gold rush’ is over.
3. You cannot have implementation without creativity and new ideas. For example, we are at the implementation stage with one of fashion clients and part of it is coming up with a new economic model for their enterprise to increase cash flow and reduce debt. How would we have been able to come up with new economic platform, if it were not for creativity?
4. Creativity is the process that binds ideas and innovation; its the key ingredient. There is creativity at every stage of the process, you need it to come up with new accounting systems, create the marketing campaign, communicate your new product, retrain your staff to accept the new idea, and even to come up with the implementation strategy. We never stop creating.
5. What makes implementation unsuccessful? It could have been because of the size of the company, it takes years for a big company to react even to the smallest of change. It could be because the implementation team was not creative enough to come up with a strong implementation strategy. It could be that their competitors were quicker of the mark to react to change. Many reasons and factors play a role to the success or failure of implementation.We all need to get better at implementation, but equally we need to get better at the idea catalyst stage and start out with a strong idea. We also need to see creativity as a process, which some people can do really well or some may do badly, as some companies can waste time and money implementing weak ideas. It’s not enough to say you are good at creativity just because you have lots ideas….you can have loads of bad ideas.

Lastly, creativity is not innovation, but it’s the core ingredient in making it happen.