How to increase your Creativity & Innovation

Creativity vs. Innovation

The main difference between creativity and innovation is the focus. 

Creativity is about unleashing the potential of the mind to conceive new ideas. Those concepts could manifest themselves in any number of ways, but most often, they become something we can see, hear, smell, touch, or taste. However, creative ideas can also be thought experiments within one person’s mind. Creativity is subjective, making it hard to measure.

Innovation, on the other hand, is completely measurable. Innovation is about introducing change into relatively stable systems. It’s also concerned with the work required to make an idea viable. By identifying an unrecognized and unmet need, an organization can use innovation to apply its creative resources to design an appropriate solution and reap a return on its investment.

Organizations often chase creativity, but what they really need to pursue is innovation. Theodore Levitt puts it best: “What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e. putting ideas to work.”

10 Strategies for Increasing your Creativity and Innovation

1. Truly creative people have developed their ability to observe and to use all of their senses, which can get dull over time. Take time to "sharpen the blade" and take everything in.


2. Innovation is based on knowledge. Therefore, you need to continually expand your knowledge base. Read things you don't normally read.


3. Your perceptions may limit your reasoning. Be careful about how you're perceiving things. In other words, defer judgment.


4. Practice guided imagery so you can "see" a concept come to life.


5. Let your ideas "incubate" by taking a break from them. 


6. Experience as much as you can. Exposure puts more ideas into your subconscious. Actively seek out new experiences to broaden your experience portfolio.


7. Treat patterns as part of the problem. Recognizing a new pattern is very useful, but be careful not to become part of it.


8. Redefine the problem completely. One of the lines I've been sharing for the past few decades is: "Your problem is not the problem; there is another problem. When you define the real problem, you can solve it and move on." After all, if you had correctly defined the real problem, you would have solved it long ago because all problems have solutions.


9. Look where others aren't looking to see what others aren't seeing.


10. Come up with ideas at the beginning of the innovation process ... and then stop. Many times we come up with several ideas and start innovating, and then we come up with more ideas and never get a single idea done. At some point you have to turn off the idea generation part of the process and really work on the innovation and execution part in order to bring a project to life.