What is a synonym for ‘innovate’? Is there a difference between innovation and creativity? These questions concern everyone on the individual, community, or corporate levels.
Path to Innovation, Its Meaning, and Synonym for ‘Innovate’
In fact, innovation can be considered as the mastery of combination. To understand this principle, it it first necessary to differentiate innovation and creativity.
| Innovate | Innovation |
| Make a breakthrough Disrupt some practice Pioneer | Breakthrough Disruption Brainchild |
Creativity relates to mental processes, imagination, and the ability of one’s mind to generate creative ideas.
In contrast, innovation is the process of applying creativity to create something new, improve the existing things, or find unusual solutions to problems.
First, one should understand that all things in the universe already exist in some form. So we can innovate through noticing the existance of something that has not been noticed or discovered yet, but not through making inexistent existent. That is why, innovation is the mastery of combination through noticing connections between things and combining them into a new form.
Furthermore, there can be a problem that requires innovation. Then, there are two directions to innovate. First of all, one may improve the existing processes, technology, and other things. The other path is to make a breakthrough or discovery, being a synonym for ‘innovate.’
Particularly, the first type of improving the functionality, features or characteristics of products, processes or other things creates incremental or sustaining innovations.
The second type leads to disruptive innovations. They make a breakthrough (not an improvement of the existing things, but the discovery of new technologies and other things or alternative solutions). It may also result in revolutionary innovations (without alternatives).
Companies can use open and closed types of innovation. The first category is based on using external resources from other fields and industries, whereby innovative things can be used outside the company. Closed innovations require internal company resources and improve internal processes, services or products.
Innovation as the Mastery of Combination
In fact, when a person has some knowledge base through research, communication, and interaction, he or she can combine things into innovative solutions.
The principle is to notice some common factors, patterns, and relations between things, which others have not noticed yet. Thus, innovation is when people combine existing inventions, concepts, phenomena or other things into something new.
An example is an innovative business model of Uber. It is a combination of taxi services and Internet technology. That is why innovation is the mastery of comination. It means establishing connections between:
- previously unconnected things,
- objects and processes,
- processes and processes,
- patterns and technology etc.
To innovate, one should find new combinations between the previously unrelated things, ideas, objects, processes, and other aspects. This mastery of combination can be applied to any sphere:
- creative writing (a combination of unrelated things in one story),
- business processes (like the combination of the Internet and taxi by Uber),
- life (combinations in lifehacks) and other fields.
Read the mastery of combination in creative writing in the next article.