The other half: from creativity to innovation

Suppose the work is finished. In the terms this course has been using, that is creativity completed and innovation not yet begun.

Dawson and colleagues, following Bessant and Tidd, define innovation as the successful exploitation of new ideas — the process of translating ideas into useful and used products, processes and services. Amabile's formulation sits underneath: creativity is a necessary but not sufficient condition for innovation. A collection nobody encounters has generated ideas and realised nothing.

Nijstad and colleagues describe this gap as a genuine divide in the research literature itself. Creativity research has concentrated on how novel ideas are generated, largely at the individual and team level; innovation research has concentrated on how ideas are selected, developed, adopted and diffused, largely at the organisational level. Their argument is that bridges between the two are still being built — and this is exactly the point where most people have to cross the divide without a map.

Different norms are needed for creativity and for implementation

The most directly useful finding for this lesson comes from Dawson and colleagues' treatment of organisational culture, which distinguishes norms that promote creativity from norms that promote implementation. They are not the same, and a team good at one is not automatically good at the other.

Norms that promote creativity include a focus on idea generation (Google's rule allowing engineers time on projects outside their job description is the standard illustration), a continuous learning culture, risk-taking, tolerance of mistakes, support for change, and constructive conflict handling.

Norms that promote implementation are different: teamwork and effective group functioning, and speed and urgency. Ideas do not become innovations without people working together across boundaries and without a felt sense that time matters.

This explains something teams experience and rarely diagnose correctly. A group that was excellent through Lessons 2 to 5 — generating, exploring, tolerating ambiguity — can stall completely at launch, and conclude that it has run out of creativity. It has not. It has hit the point where a different set of norms is required, and nobody named the switch.

They also note the role of open communication and forums for internal and external debate, and Kanter's finding that lack of information hinders creativity — cultures need open discussion, constructive conflict, fair evaluation of ideas and fast approvals. In a small team, "fast approvals" simply means somebody has the authority to say yes without waiting three weeks.

Ideas do not spread by being good

Both Dawson and Goller draw on the diffusion tradition associated with Everett Rogers: an innovation spreads through a social system over time, through communication channels, and adoption depends on how potential adopters perceive it — its relative advantage, compatibility with their existing values, complexity, trialability and observability.

Read those five against a cause-driven NFT collection aimed at people who care about the issue but have never used a wallet. Complexity is high. Trialability is low — you cannot casually try owning one. Observability is moderate. Compatibility with the values of a typical NGO audience may be actively negative, given what many people believe about the technology.

This is the theoretical reason the practical lesson insists on leading with the cause and never the mechanism, making the first step tiny, explaining the technology once in one place, and including a physical element. Each is an attempt to reduce perceived complexity and raise trialability and observability for an audience that has no prior reason to engage with the format.

Creativity includes bringing it into existence

Adair's position, from his chapter on working ideas out, is worth restating here because it resists the split this lesson describes. He distinguishes creative thinking from creativity — the latter including actually bringing the thing into existence — and then argues that separating them is usually arbitrary. Ideas continue to develop, adapt and change during implementation.

He is also realistic about the limits of individual effort: you develop the product yourself up to a point, but beyond that point it must become a team effort, especially if you intend to take it to a market. A campaign is precisely that point.

And his chapter on not waiting for inspiration supplies the discipline for a phase that feels unrewarding: better to advance by inches than not to advance at all. His statistical reframing is a good thing to hear when tired — creative thinking is, for ninety-nine hours out of every hundred, not very creative. It is endlessly varied combinations of analysing, synthesizing, imagining and valuing.

Direction: turning a selected idea into action

Griffiths' fourth Solution Finder step is called Direction, and its function is to turn ideas into action — goals, plans, ownership, dates. It exists as a separate step because teams routinely treat the moment of selecting an idea as the end of the process. Selection is not implementation; a chosen idea with no owner and no date has not been chosen in any operational sense.

This is the structural reason the campaign plan in the practical lesson demands a named owner and a date for every content item, and why it asks for the four post-launch weeks to be planned before launch day.

Defining success honestly

Two threads justify the multi-dimensional success definition. First, Chan and Schunn's separation of impact from feasibility: measuring only sales is measuring a narrow feasibility outcome and ignoring impact entirely. Second, Segre, Dattilo and Salvador's work on the meeting point of creativity and innovation in the design sector, which examines the role of technology and environmental sustainability — a reminder that in design-adjacent fields, value is increasingly assessed on dimensions that a sales figure does not capture.

Defining success across several dimensions before launch is therefore not a consolation mechanism. It is a more accurate measurement.