Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things. The difference speaks for itself. Yet the fluent advisers to business seldom make the distinction. They tend to rate ideas more by their novelty than by their practicability.

Creativity is the basis of all innovation, and although it is doubtful that it can be taught, creativity should be nurtured in those who have it.

Creativity is the focused combination of unlikely things. Your mind locks onto a certain element and then searches widely for something unexpected that fits with it. What can scuba diving teach you about agriculture? What can trees teach you about public speaking? There is always some connective tissue between disciplines. If you wish to be more creative, look for the connections between two previously unconnected things.

Creativity is seeing the same thing, but thinking differently.

Creativity is choice-making.

The important aspect of creativity is seeing the same thing as everybody else, but thinking of something different. Innovation and creativity ultimately results into the culture of excellence.

Creativity is the ability to introduce order into the randomness of nature.

Creativity is intelligence having fun.

Creativity is seeing what everyone else sees, but then thinking a new thought that has never been thought before and expressing it somehow. It could be with art, a sculpture, music or even in science. The difference, however, between scientific creativity and any other kind of creativity, is that no matter how long you wait, no one else will ever compose "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony" except for Beethoven. No matter what you do, no one else will paint Van Gogh's "Starry Night." Only Van Gogh could do that because it came from his creativity.<p>Whereas in science, you can't just make stuff up and presume that it is a proper account of nature. At the end of the day, you have to answer to nature. Since everyone has nature to answer to, your creativity is simply discovering something about the natural world that somebody else would have eventually discovered exactly the same way. They might have come through a different path, but they would have landed in the same place.<p>Even though we name theorems and equations after the people who discover them — Newton's laws of gravity, Kepler's laws of planetary motion — somebody else would have discovered them afterward. It's that simple. Your creativity is not a boundless creativity.

Innovation involves bringing together ideas, research, development, financing, and commercialization.

One form of originality is creation. Another form is synthesis.

People often focus so much on creating new ideas that they overlook the value of synthesizing ideas from different sources.

Innovation usually mean connecting previously unconnected concepts.

Creativity is a continual surprise.

Creativity could be described as letting go of certainties.

But innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.