Innovation Idea.jpg

We have seen that entrepreneurs are creative and innovative. What’s the difference between these two characteristics?

Creativity can be thought of as enabling a person to think and unleash new ideas. Innovation, on the other hand, involves putting those ideas into practice, making the idea viable [1].

Being creative can be fun, but if you can’t turn an idea into reality, your business is doomed to fail. “What is often lacking is not creativity in the idea-creating sense but innovation in the action-producing sense, i.e., putting ideas to work” [2]. At the same time, if you don’t generate new ideas, you have no innovation either. Just remember that you need both.

activity

How to generate business ideas

Do an internet search for “Techniques to generate business ideas”. Read two or three of the articles that come up.

WEnote

From your reading, choose one technique that appeals to you and share it on WE Notes.
Post your comment(s) below and then look on the course feed page to see what others have posted.

You must be logged in to post to WEnotes.


If you prefer you can create a post on your learning journal blog. Be sure to label or tag your post IENT101.
Note: Your comment will be displayed in the course feed.

reading

Required reading

Remember, don’t skip readings they are an integral part of this course.

  1. Read this article on “Facilitating Creativity and Innovation” from Saylor (2012).
    • The article ended with these “all encompassing lessons”:
      • Innovation is the result of willful and serendipitous interconnections between the little a-has.
      • Innovation usually involves intellectual and technological maturity levels so that learning-by-doing is possible.
      • Innovation requires dialog, learning-about, encouragement, time, solitude, experimentation, construction, and some pressure, but not too much.
      • Learning-about, learning-by-doing using prototyping, and hard work are the keys to creativity and successful innovation.
  2. In your Learning Journal Blog, write briefly what each one of these lessons means to you.
  3. Write about 500 words in total.
  4. Remember to tag or label your post using the course code: IENT101 (This is needed to harvest a link to your blog post in the course feed.)

References

  1. Business insider
  2. Harvard Business Review