Useful, not just new

Every serious definition of creativity in this course's literature contains two words, not one. Dawson and colleagues: creativity is the process through which new and useful ideas are generated. Adair: to call something creative implies that it has real value, extrinsic or intrinsic. Novelty on its own does not qualify.

This lesson is about the second word.

Valuing as a distinct function of thinking

Adair's model of effective thinking has three functions: analysing, synthesizing and valuing — assessing worth. He is careful to say these are not a stately procession from one to the next; they interweave. But valuing is a genuine, separate operation, and one that most teams perform badly because they perform it at the wrong moment (too early, killing ideas) or not at all (too late, defending a favourite).

He also supplies a compact set of selection criteria, noting that different fields weight them differently: Is it simple? Is it true? Is it beautiful? Is it useful? Is it practicable? Is it commercial? For social-purpose work, you might reasonably add a seventh: does it serve the mission?

And recall the myth from Lesson 1's theory: coming up with new ideas is not the hardest part of creativity. The difficult part is identifying which ideas have value and can actually be realised. That sentence is this lesson.

Splitting "appropriateness" into impact and feasibility

Creativity research has long defined creative work as that which is both novel and appropriate. Chan and Schunn argue that lumping everything into "appropriateness" hides an important distinction, and propose separating it into two components: impact — how much difference the idea would make if it worked — and feasibility — whether it can actually be done.

This distinction is unusually practical, because the two failure modes are opposite and both are common. An idea with high impact and low feasibility is the roadmap promise that never ships and damages trust. An idea with high feasibility and low impact is the discount code — deliverable, harmless, and doing nothing for the cause.

It is also why the practical exercise scores utility ideas on three axes rather than one: value to the holder, strength for the mission (impact), and ability to deliver reliably for three years (feasibility). Teams reliably inflate the third axis, which is exactly what the research would predict — feasibility judgements made by the people who want the idea to work are optimistic.

Sort, screen, select

Griffiths' third Solution Finder step, Analysis, gives a workable structure for evaluation and it maps onto what the lesson asks you to do.

Sort. Reduce a large pool to a shortlist of three to six, clustering by theme first if you have fifty or a hundred ideas. His discipline during sorting is worth borrowing: replace "yes, but…" with "yes, if…". A negative opening closes the door on an odd idea that might have real potential; "yes, if" invites speculation and gives the idea room to breathe.

Screen. He rejects ticking ideas against a long list of pre-set criteria as a poor use of judgement, and proposes instead a Heart/Head evaluation: rate each idea from 1 to 10 on how you feel about it emotionally, and separately from 1 to 10 on whether it holds up logically, then combine. Some ideas score high on heart and low on head, some the reverse. He adds a detail useful for a team: a wide spread of scores across the team indicates a lack of consensus — which is information, not noise, and a signal to explore further rather than to average.

Select. Only then commit — and Griffiths' final step, Direction, turns the selected idea into goals and an action plan, which is where naming the responsible person and the cost belongs.

Four kinds of innovation — utility is usually two of them

Tidd and Bessant's 4Ps of innovation, reported by Dawson and colleagues, distinguish:

• Product innovation — a new thing.
• Process innovation — a new way of making or delivering it.
• Position innovation — changing the context in which something is offered. Their example: Lucozade repositioned from a medicinal drink for sick children to a sports drink.
• Paradigm innovation — reframing the underlying assumptions. Their example: air travel understood as expensive, until low-cost airlines changed what everyone assumed.

Notice where utility design sits. Adding a workshop place, a vote, a volunteering route or a membership to a token is not primarily product innovation — the artwork is the product. It is position innovation (this is not a collectible, it is a membership in a movement) and sometimes paradigm innovation (supporters are not donors, they are stakeholders with a vote). Naming that helps you see that the most interesting move may not be visual at all.

Why the mission test matters

Dawson and colleagues define innovation, following Bessant and Tidd, as the successful exploitation of new ideas — translating them into useful and used products, processes and services. The word "used" carries weight. A utility nobody exercises has not been implemented; it has been announced.

Nijstad and colleagues, writing on the gap between creativity research and innovation research, note that the two literatures have historically studied different halves of the same phenomenon — idea generation on one side, realisation and adoption on the other — and that bridging them is unfinished work. Lesson 6 is where that bridge gets crossed, and where failing to cross it becomes visible: a beautiful collection whose stated benefits are never delivered has stopped at creativity and never reached innovation.

Budnik's work on the tokenisation of creativity is the relevant caution on the technology itself — it examines both the prospects and the risks of representing creative work and rights as tokens, and anyone designing revenue-linked utility should treat the legal and structural questions as genuinely open rather than solved.