Creativity And Innovation In The Nonprofit Sector: What's the Difference?

"Creativity is the process of generating ideas. It involves divergent and random thinking, and mixing up a range of possibilities. By its nature it's chaotic. Creativity produces lots of possibilities, only a small number of which have real potential. This means that you must also accept that creativity will produce a great many useless ideas for every one worth running with. Innovation is the process of choosing and selecting one or more of the ideas generated in creativity mode so as to exploit their potential. It involves convergent and focused thinking. It is systematic and selective.

Innovation is rational and organized, and by its nature practical. Its outcome is to produce a workable solution, so the starting point is to discard useless ideas. As individuals and organizations, we need to practice the processes of both creativity and innovation until they become deeply embedded skills.

By using both of them we can dramatically improve performance, but they do need to be linked and sequenced correctly."