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Creativity My Visionairy Concepts

The difference between innovation and creativity

Ah, the difference between innovation and creativity! I will only argue my point of view from a technology perspective ( hence, it is not said that it can’t be used elsewhere)…

if you look up innovation on wikipedia you will see this =

the process of making improvements by introducing something new

if you look up creativity you will see this =

Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts

But it is my understanding that a lot of people have a problem differing innovation from creativity.

What we came down to at the creativity workshop ( I conducted at Shift06 together with Dannie Jost) was that innovation was very hard to achieve nowadays – because so many things have already been developed. Also, the word is slightly misused by a lot of companies, kind of like a cool factor has worn down.

Creativity on the contrary is in the eye of the beholder. It depends on the domain you are in and what culture you are exposing it to – mainly I would say it is very hard to be called creative in technology.

Are bloggers creative? – well if you ask somebody who hasn’t read blogs before, then yes !. If you ask Doc Searls there’s probably a lot of things he has read already and he would characterize as “same old same old”…

we get more accustomed with other people’s experiences and ideas, in different domains.

the same would go if we talk about art. is street art creative? – yes, if you live in a city where street art isn’t the norm. But if you already own a Banksy book and live near Brick Lane in London, I doubt you will find new street art extremely creative.

so what is my point here? that for people to do something ( projects, art, technology, blogs) that are creative, you have to show it to the right people. For creativity to take off, you have to find people that are not used to your kind of creativity.

that’s all!

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