Joyce said something in her first post that has really had me thinking: "Our intent then was to help people understand that to do innovation well, you had to do a lot more than just come up with a bunch of ideas ... that there was a significant difference between creativity and innovation."

Maybe I can get Joyce to expand on that, but in the meantime, I looked around and found this (emphasis mine):

" 'People always tend to use the terms innovation andcreativity interchangeably. We're very clear about the linkages and the distinction. Creativity is getting the great ideas, it's sort of the R&D, and everybody is creative, everybody has got great ideas, every organisation has more great ideas than it can ever implement or bring into the marketplace.' Innovation, however, is 'creativity implemented', he [Arnold Wasserman of The Idea Factory]  points out. 'It's taking creative ideas and bringing them into the world so that they change lives, and so they also change the organisations that bring them into the world.' "

The quote above come from an Asia Business Times article published April 8, 2003 (original article is now archived -- the link is to a Google cache page, so check it out before it goes away!. I couldn't find a working link to The Idea Factory, a Singapore-based consultancy founded by John Kao).

This seems to be something of a facile distinction that relegates creativity only to idea fluency, and relegates innovation only to some advanced form of project management. So I don't think that's it, and I don't think that's what Joyce had in mind either.

But it's an interesting starting place for a discussion. Is some innovation more creative than others, some creativity more innovative? What makes an idea innovative? Simply that it can be implemented within a company's business model? That it leads to a "disruptive" business model or technology? What's the difference between a creative idea and an un-creative idea?

And no, I'm not just playing around with words (not that there's anything wrong with that!). I'll be thinking and writing more on this.