5.7 Creativity versus Innovation

A distinction needs to be made between creativity and innovation to clarify some differences that exist in the literature. Except for a few researchers, definitions of organizational innovation have excluded any mention of creativity or idea generation. For example, organizational innovation has been defined as "first or early use of an idea by one of a set of organizations with similar goals", “the adoption of means or ends that are new to the adopting unit", the adoption of a change which is new to an organization and to the relevant environment, "an idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an individual or other unit of adoption", and "adopted changes considered new to the organization's environment".

Reviewing these definitions and others suggests that organizational innovation is: (1) change perceived as new to an organization, (2) something new that is adopted for use by an organization (with the implication often being that implementation will follow adoption automatically), and (3) relative to the organization adopting and using something new; what is innovative for one organization may not be innovative for another.

Organizational creativity, on the other hand, often is used to mean the same thing as organizational innovation. This usage is especially evident in the nonempirical writings on organizational creativity. Most of this work neglects to define organizational creativity precisely. However, it usually can be inferred that the writers view organizational creativity as representing the sum total of the creative traits, abilities and actions of all the organization's members. It also can be inferred from this literature that an organization will be creative if the proportion of creative individuals (and their creative acts) exceed the proportion of "noncreative” individuals.

It can be assumed that all individuals in organizations are creative and vary only in the degree of their creativeness, and then all organizations must be considered creative. Furthermore, just as some individuals are more creative than others, some organizations should also be more creative than others. It would then follow that a creative organization is likely to be more successful at innovation than a less creative organization. That is a highly creative organization should be better able to initiate, adopt, and implementt new products, services, or processes.

As conceptualized by many writers in the field, creativity might be viewed more realistically as a problem solving process with identifiable stages. One of these stages happens to be idea generation. But achievement of creative solutions cannot always be accomplished through idea generation alone, other activities such as data‑finding and problem‑finding also are important.

It probably is most realistic to view creativity as a process that cuts across all aspects of the innovation process. Idea generation may be used in some stages of the process at different times and within different subsystems of a particular organization. However, other stages of the creative problem-solving process also may assume equal or greater importance depending upon the needs and perceptions of individual innovators within an organization.

In some instances, an organization may generate idea proposals internally or it may decide to adopt externally‑generated proposals. In either case, some degree of creative problem solving may be involved. For example, a decision to adopt an externally‑generated proposal may produce new problems for an organization, any of which may require development of creative solutions. Thus, innovation and creative problem-solving processes are closely intertwined. It is very difficult to consider one without considering the other.

For our present purposes, the innovation process will be viewed as consisting of the following stages: (1) problem awareness and identification, (2) idea proposal, (3) idea adoption and (4) idea implementation. Such a process is very similar to the basic Osborn‑Parnes five‑step creative problem‑solving model of fact‑finding, Problem‑finding, Idea‑finding, Solution‑finding, and Acceptance‑finding.

Based upon this four‑step model, organizational innovation will be defined as the process of proposing, adopting, and implementing an idea (process, product, or service) new to an organization in response to a perceived problem. This definition emphasizes that innovation: (1) is a continuous, dynamic set of activities (2) deals with the concept of newness relative to a particular organization and (3) is stimulated by a perceived gap in performance (a problem).