Creativity Versus Innovation

A creative chef can make a meal with limited ingredients and utensils. An innovative chef uses unique ingredients and utensils in an unconventional way.  Repeating the experiments could make them more conventional, almost to the point of being too ordinary or routine, or less novel. If an idea becomes a meme, then the spirit of innovation fades, as too many people are doing it. If you think like a fiction writer, innovation could read like an unnerving Black Mirror episode: Company A is innovative, and has discovered a way of making workers more  productive by metered micro-doses of pharmaceuticals at various points of the day, controlled by an MD that works  in HR, insidiously making workers more productive by stimulating their endocrine systems. To quote Einstein, “If at  first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it”. Charlie Brooker experiments with the absurd, only to leave the viewer with the sense that life is now imitating art. Once that slippage occurs, cognitive dissonance fades out and things become ordinary again, not innovative, and perhaps even boring. Black Mirror episodes must stay on the knife edge, but once a formula, routine, or pattern emerges, innovation becomes more elusive, and you then need new constraints to make something surprising occur.

Comments

Popular Posts