What Creativity and Innovation Mean

Every organisation meets problems it has not seen before: a new customer demand, a slow process, a cost that keeps rising, a service that people complain about. Some teams answer with the same solution they used last time. Other teams find a better way. The difference is often not intelligence or money. It is the habit of thinking creatively and the discipline of turning ideas into real change.

This course is for employees, team leaders and managers in any sector who want to produce better ideas and help their organisation use them. You do not need to be "a creative person". Creativity is a set of skills and habits that anyone can learn and practise.

Three words that are often confused

• Creativity is producing ideas that are both new and useful. An idea that is new but useless is not creative in a work sense. An idea that is useful but old is simply good practice.
• Invention is creating something new — a device, a method, a design — whether or not anybody uses it.
• Innovation is putting a new idea into use so that it creates value: for customers, for staff, for the organisation or for society. ISO 56000, the international vocabulary standard for innovation management, describes an innovation as a new or changed entity that realises or redistributes value.

A simple way to remember it: creativity is thinking up new things; innovation is doing new things that create value.

Two short examples

Example 1. A warehouse supervisor at Quorvale Logistics notices that pickers walk past the same slow-moving items to reach the fast-moving ones. She suggests moving the fast movers near the packing area. The idea is creative (new for that site and useful) and it becomes an innovation when the layout is changed and walking time falls.

Example 2. An engineer at Brenlow Engineering designs a clever tool holder at home but never shows it to anyone. It is an invention, but not yet an innovation, because nobody uses it and no value is created.