Between Creativity, Invention, Innovation and Novelty

"A man paints with his brains and not with his hands." - Michelangelo Buonarroti;1475-1564

Based on the quote above, now I should be able to understand how the creativity works to people who earn the creativity.

From the class lesson I learned, the creative person is the one who generates new ideas. And can create a creative process. While, the creative process is how these new ideas, solutions, and inventions are produced. So, in order to make something, a person needs to be creative and in order to be a creative person, creative person is needed. This way, the creativity will exists through somebody’s mind and be able to make something. Also, quoted from class lesson:

Creativity is the process of generating something new that has value. There are many new ideas and concepts, but some may not have value and hence may not be considered creative. A creation is something original that has value. (Haggins, 1995, p. 3)
Therefore, creativity does not happen inside people’s heads, but in the interaction between a person’s thoughts and a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than individual phenomenon. (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996, p.23)

There are four types of creativity. Creative people fall into these 4 catagories:

1) Aesthetic Organizers.
2) Boundary Pushers — those who take an existing idea and push it a little further.
3) Inventors — those who take existing knowledge and create new ideas — the Edisons of this world.
4) The rarest group: Boundary Breakers — the Leonardos and the Copernicuses.

( A paraphrasing of Elliot Eisner (1933-), American art educator)

However, some people considering that creativity is almost has the same meaning as Innovation, which is some sort of misunderstanding concept. Innovation means to bring new ideas or making changes or improvise something, based on Oxford Dictionary. In short, innovation only existed based to something that is already existed while creativity is applied to something very new. In other words, innovation is the process of turning ideas into practical reality. Based on the class lessons as well, innovation is the process of making improvements by introducing something new, the realization of a creative idea in a social context.

How about the invention? It might be related to innovation things. Well, invention is the outcome of something that the inventor has produced or done, based on existing results or knowledge for something that has purposes. The most well known invention thing is the telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell. Before, nobody really knows how that thing works.

Moreover, it was not widely used, even some people claimed that the telephone does not serve any purposes to people. That thought was wrong. As we look today, the telephone has become common, but important thing in our daily life. The best invention in the history is still existed.

Now, let’s take a look about the novelty. Novelty is the quality of being new. It might also refer to something unusual from the current thing. The best example is the fashion apparel. We see that there are so many fashions design. Today, people have created so many fashion designs, just only based from one thing. If people gave only one piece of cloth, many people will design something with in so many different ways. Some may have a novelty in it, where it might be a fresh new thing that has been applied.