Essay on Innovation, Design, and Creativity

What are creativity, innovation, and design, and how are these concepts important to meeting the objectives of an organization? To understand these concepts they must first be defined. Webster’s dictionary (http://www.merriam-webster.com) defines creativity as the “Ability to produce something new through imaginative skill, whether a new solution to a problem, a new method or device, or a new artistic objects or form. The term generally refers to a richness of ideas and originality of thinking. Psychological studies of highly creative people have shown that many have a strong interest in apparent disorder, contradiction, and imbalance, which seem to be perceived as challenges. Such individuals may possess an

Entrepreneurs use many tools to propel their endeavors. One of the tools that many entrepreneurs use is the innovation concept. The innovation concept is the development of new disciplines and practices within the frame work of the concept. Entrepreneurs bring about innovation through opportunities that are caused by change. Technology innovation, processes innovation, service innovation and product innovation are some of the ways that the opportunities within the innovation concept can be found. Each of these ways of finding opportunities happen in different ways.

Innovations form the main sources of competitive advantages and are always of significance for the growth of a company. Companies or organizations put their greater efforts in improving their performance by finding new ideas and knowledge on the best way of beating their competitors and therefore give satisfaction to their customers. There are various factors involved in the innovation design system which can be either internal or external.

Alongside the entrepreneur spirit, Innovation is the process of taking new ideas and implementing them into the market. Key word being “new”, an innovation can be sometimes viewed as the application to better solutions that meet new demand-requirements, inarticulated needs or existing market needs. Innovative ideas range from: goods, services, products, processes, services, technologies or ideas that create value for which customers will pay for. For an idea to be an innovation, it must be replicable at an economical cost and must satisfy a specific need. This means is that one must be ready and willing put their new idea to the test. On the other hand, there is recognition that “innovation is also critical to cultural, environmental, social, and artistic progress as well” (Bullinger, 2006). With this stated, high-tech innovation is ultimately the reason why we can be thankful for the many new conveniences of the 21st century. Although we might see the forefront of innovation being very prominent in today’s world, innovation is truly nothing new. From the start of modern man times, innovative ideas have paved the way for civilization to advance and develop into what we are today and at the same time, we have barely begin to chip away at the tip of the iceberg of our true human potential. Some scholars believe that innovation is a

Innovation is what gives businesses the competitive advantage the company will need to be profitable in the market. Innovation impacts the strategy, process, products and services that a company has to offer. Three organizations that have greatly used innovation are Discover Financial Services, Apple Inc, and McDonalds.

This is the first case study report for the course ED5317: Strategies for Managing Innovation that is based on the Harvard Business School case titled ‘Design Thinking and Innovation at Apple’. The report consists of the following question:

My personal philosophy of innovation encompasses many ideas. It is not only thinking outside of the box, but questioning why the box is even necessary. It is about creating opportunity out of disappointment, being open to different, and unafraid of being vulnerable. It is about breathing, living, and embodying the change that you want to see in the world and exploring new paths in achieving that change. Innovation is being courageously defiant in the face of the universe shouting “You can’t” and replying with a resounding “Watch me”.

Featured in this and many of the other theories and definitions for Innovation, are two strong common elements. Firstly the notion that innovation involves something new, original or improved and secondly the suggestion that this creates value and generally refers to an idea that changing processes or improves effectiveness or efficiency of a product, process or organisation. For businesses, this could mean implementing new ideas, creating dynamic products or improving existing services. Innovation can be a catalyst for the growth and success of a business, and help to adapt and grow in the marketplace.

• Amabile: How to Kill Creativity? Harvard Business Review 1998 (course packet; writeup 1. For Feb 5)

The term creativity is used for the purpose of describing the ability that is concerned with the process of creating something new or valuable. This ability allows a person to surpass the rules, practices, methods, forms or similar kind of activities that the traditional society may be performing at that time. Creativity is one of the most important things that have allowed the people of the society to move forward and urge for development. All the development that has been made in various aspects of human life can be directly connected with the creativity. All the industry leaders of the world have secured this place because of the level of creativity and innovation that they showed. They used this creativity for creating something new that has allowed them to develop completely new methods for this purpose.

Creativity is one of the most important when it comes to innovation as it is a process. Creativity is about creating new ideas and the process of innovation is making these ideas come to reality. Creativity cannot be a waste of time, if there is no process in place to make these ideas and turn them into something that has market potentials.

Change, creativity and innovation are essential elements for survival and growth of an organization. Creativity is vital for the birth of fresh and beneficial ideas. Creative thinking allows groups and individuals to solve problems or stimulate to think differently in order to bring forth fruitful ideas. The above mentioned creative thinking enabled our team of six different personalities to come together and implement a plan to solve a complex problem in a hospital. Our assigned task was to recommend a plan in order to alleviate hospital readmission among elderly population within thirty days of discharge. In this paper the author is narrating the team dynamics, functionalities and personal competencies in the process of recommending a change in the system. As a member in the innovation leadership team the author is also reflecting on the assessment, capacity for innovation in the organization which is the hospital where the team is assigned.

Innovation is normally used to denote the process that takes place when a product or a process is developed, from idea to market; the concept of invention only denotes the process that takes place when new ideas or solutions are generated. Baumol (2002) argues “is it possible to have lots of inventions and still lack innovations. Nevertheless, inventions are a necessary precondition for innovation”.

Harvard business essentials : managing creativity and innovation, 2003, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, Mass.

In today’s knowledge-based economy, innovation has become the principal source of competitive advantages in global business; the success of firms now depends more on their intelligence capability – such as employee creativity – than traditional material assets (Amabile et al., as cited in Zhou, Zhang & Montoro-Sa ́nchez, 2011). The creative capability of individual and collective knowledge workers is the fuel that powers innovation in firms. While creativity leads to the production of new and useful ideas in any domain, innovation is the successful implementation of those creative ideas within an organisation (McLean, as cited in Zhou, Zhang & Montoro-Sa ́nchez 2011). In highly dynamic business environments innovation and creativity have become crucial for creating competitive advantages for the