Information, Knowledge and Agile Creativity

1Creativity for Innovation

In a general context, the terms creativity and innovation are often used as synonyms to refer to a process whose objective or result is the production of a novelty. However, these two terms do not address the same aspects of the development of a novelty, even though intuitively, when we consider them as steps in a process leading to the realization of a novelty, we place creativity before innovation. If we choose to consider them as two currents that can be developed in parallel with this same process, we very quickly believe that there must be many exchanges between them and therefore that they must be considered as complementary.

In this book, we will discuss creativity as a system and not only as a process, linking it directly to an expected objective of innovation. We therefore make the a priori choice of a creativity that precedes innovation. We will see that this consideration based on the idea of a system makes it possible to consider more complex and especially cyclical relationships between the stages of creativity and innovation. However, before coming to these considerations, it seems necessary for us, in order to properly address these distinctions and complementarities between the concepts expressed by these two terms, to review their definitions, since certain nuances are made depending on the fields and authors. We will also rely on the different forms or variations in the way innovation is approached and to better make the link with ...