The difference between creativity and innovation

As well as working independently as a consultant and executive coach, I am also an academic. From August, I will be Professor of Innovation and the Creative Economy at University of the Arts London, where I already work as Associate Dean of Knowledge Exchange and Enterprise. So… what is the difference between creativity and innovation? And what does any of this have to do with coaching?

What is innovation?

Innovation is a concept so widely championed that it might seem almost meaningless. The key point for me is that innovation is not only about new technologies. Instead, it refers to the creation of any new product, service or business model.

Jan van den Ende's three-stage model of innovation managemen

It is often pointed out that innovation is distinct from invention, a key point in the difference between creativity and innovation. Creativity is the generation of novel ideas, while innovation is persuading others to adopt those ideas. To quote Jan van Den Ende in Innovation management, innovation involves not just developing ideas (stage one in the image above) but also selecting and implementing them too (stages two and three... although I'm not sure the reality is quite this linear.)

To understand the distinction between creativity and innovation, consider the fact that the person who invented the hoover was not W. H. Hoover: it was a department store janitor named J. Murray Spangler. The person who invented the sewing machine was not Isaac Singer, but a Boston resident called Elias Howe. And the company that came up the idea of renting out homes via a website was not Airbnb but Vacation Rentals by Owner. Remember them? Me neither.

To understand the distinction between creativity and innovation, then, we need to abandon the idea that, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. The benefits from innovation often go not to the creator or inventor but those best able to manage the associated risks and rewards.

That said, I don’t see creativity as only concerned with generating ideas: the ‘front end’ of innovation. My point is not only that the three-stage model pictured above is a little messier in reality. It is also that creativity, to me, is required throughout the innovation process. Think, for instance, of the role of so-called 'design thinking' in selecting ideas or of the role of advertising and the media in driving adoption. The creative economy, then, is a key driver not just of the initial idea development stage but of the whole innovation process.

The reality of innovation management

What is the creative economy?

The concept of the creative industries emerged in the late 1990s, more or less in parallel with the rise of knowledge work and the post-industrial economy. The idea, in a nutshell, was to make an argument for creativity framed in terms of jobs, urban regeneration and economic growth. Today, the UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) identifies nine creative industries sub-sectors:

1. advertising and marketing;

2. architecture;

3. craft;

4. design;

5. film, TV, video, radio and photography;

6. IT, software and computer services;

7. publishing;

8. museums, galleries and libraries;

9. music, performing arts and visual arts.

This creative industries concept has been globally influential, perhaps because the UK creative industries are said to generate £108 billion a year, employ over 2.3 million people and are growing at more than 1.5 times the rate of the wider economy.

It is now recognised, however, that this £108 billion is unevenly distributed both between industries (it will surprise no-one that there is more money in IT, software and computer services than in crafts) and within industries (it is claimed, for instance, that 90% of music streams go to the top 1% of artists).

This is to say nothing of the fact that the importance of the creative industries cannot be understood in only financial terms. Whether we see it in opera or in soap opera, most of us would recognise that the creative industries have intrinsic as well as instrumental value. Neither Vincent Van Gogh nor Nick Drake, for instance, achieved much commercial success during their lifetimes. This doesn’t mean they weren’t any good. (We can think of them as the artistic equivalents of J. Murray Spangler: because they were better at generating ideas than at selecting and implementing them.)

It is also now known that the categorisation of sub-sectors as ‘creative’ in that creative industries framework was somewhat ad hoc. The current government admits in its Creative industries sector vision that there are overlaps between the creative industries and both the digital sector and the cultural sector. The reality, in any case, is that much – perhaps most – creative work occurs outside the nine sub-sectors listed above. Think, for instance, of a graphic designer working for a bank.

The issue, at root, is that the creative industries concept is rooted in creative outputs. When we consider creative inputs, however, it is clear that designers, for instance, work far beyond a specific vertical: they work right across the whole economy. The same goes for IT, software and computer services.

Relationship between the so-called creative industries and the whole economy

For this reason, some prefer to talk of the creative economy. The creative economy concept is not perfect: it focuses only on economic value, for instance. It does, however, capture the contribution of creativity to the whole economy – what economics call positive spillover – rather than only the nine sub-sectors recognised by DCMS.

What does innovation in the creative economy look like in practice?

What innovation in the creative economy looks like depends on scale. I wrote a whole book, for instance, on the musician Robert Wyatt. Wyatt might not be the first person that comes in mind when we think of innovation. Louth is a long way from Silicon Valley. A lot of Different every time, however, concerns the ways in which Wyatt – in collaboration with Alfreda Benge, his manager, lyricist, cover artist and wife – came up with both a new musical identity and a new business model after paraplegia left him unable to play the drums or to perform live.

One form of innovation in the creative economy

More recently, I wrote a book about innovation in the creative economy at a very different scale: that of a whole technology. Distributed creativity, written years before Christie’s sold a non-fungible token (NFT) representing a work of visual art for $69 million, examined the impact of blockchain and what are now called web3 technologies on various parts of the creative economy, from music and art to gaming. I am less interested in the technology itself than in who wins and who loses from its implementation. It's the vacuum cleaner a century on.

I am currently writing a book examining innovation in the creative economy at a scale somewhere in between the individual and the systemic. It is about the ways in which creative practices, from LEGO Serious Play to improv comedy, have encouraged innovation in organisations well beyond the creative industries. It is this sort of scale, that of the organisation or cluster, that I am most interested in as a coach.

What does any of this have to do with coaching?

While my work as a coach is distinct from my work as an academic, it isn’t easy to separate them completely. I first became interested in team coaching as an approach to enterprise education, linked to my role as a non-executive director of Enterprise Educators UK. I have coached entrepreneurial students and graduates and offered coaching as part of grant-funded business support projects. I’m also a member of the internal coaching pool. And I see it as a strength that my coaching is evidence-based and research-informed.

For coaches who focus on improving individual performance in the corporate sector, the idea that coaching has a connection to creativity and innovation might come as a surprise. Yet there is a growing interest among coaches in both creative methods – see, for instance, the Association for Coaching’s recent Creative Coaching Festival –  and in innovation coaching.

Strategyzer, for instance, have a team of innovation coaches whose job is to help teams craft hypotheses, design experiments and adapt business models in response. They are not offering executive coaching for leaders. Instead, they are helping teams develop ideas; articulate and test their key assumptions through sprints; and adapt repeatedly until they have an evidence-based value proposition and associated business model. In other words, they are helping their clients to move more quickly and cleanly through the idea development and selection phases of the innovation process through the sort of build-measure-learn loop popularised by Eric Ries in The lean startup. To be clear, I have nothing to do with Strategyzer. But that's more or less what I try to do too.

Innovation management meets the lean start-up

Interested in an evidence-based approach to fostering innovation in your organisation? Book a free call here.