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innovATion, dEsign And CREATiviTy 273

KEy quEsTions
● Why is the way in which companies develop their products and services
so important?
● What process do companies use to develop products and services?
● How should the effectiveness of the product and service development
process be judged in terms of fulfilling market requirements?
● What operations resource-based decisions define a company’s product
and service development strategy?

innovation, design and creativity

Developing new products and services is a creative, and often innovative, process. But
what is the relationship between terms such as ‘innovation’, ‘creativity’ and ‘design’?
They have similar but different meanings, and overlap to some extent, and are clearly
related to each other. It is best to start with what exactly we mean by ‘innovation’. In
fact, there are many definitions. The term is notoriously ambiguous and lacks either a
single definition or measure. It is … ‘a new method, idea, product, etc.’ (Oxford English
Dictionary), ‘change that creates a new dimension of performance’ (Peter Drucker, a
well-known management writer), ‘the act of introducing something new’ (the American
Heritage Dictionary), ‘a new idea, method or device’ (Webster Online Dictionary), ‘new
knowledge incorporated in products, processes and services’. What runs through all
1
these definitions is the idea of novelty and change. Innovation is simply about doing
something new. But it is worth noting that the idea of innovation is both broader and
more complete than that of ‘invention’. An ‘invention’ is also something that is novel
or unique (usually applied to a device or method), but it does not necessarily imply that
the novel device or method has the potential to be practical, economic or capable of
being developed commercially. Innovation goes further than ‘invention’. It implies not
just the novel idea, but also the process of transforming the idea into something that
provides a return for an organisation’s customers, owners or both. The study of innova-
tion, what influences it, and how to manage it, is a huge subject. However, there is one
particularly important attribute that is central to innovation – creativity. ‘Creativity’ is
the ability to move beyond conventional ideas, rules or assumptions, in order to gener-
ate significant new ideas. It is a vital ingredient in innovation.
So, if creativity is an essential ingredient of innovation, and innovation implies mak-
ing novel ideas into practical, commercial form, what is the process that transforms
innovative ideas into something more concrete? It is ‘design’. Innovation creates the
novel idea; design makes it work in practice. Design, is to ‘conceive the looks, arrange-
ment, and workings of something’. A design must deliver a solution that will work in
practice. Design is also an activity that can be approached at different levels of detail.
One may envisage the general shape and intention of something before getting down
to defining its details (we shall observe this later in this chapter when we examine the
process of product and service design). Figure 8.2 illustrates the relationship between
creativity, innovation and design as we use the terms here. These concepts are inti-
mately related, which is why we treat them in the same chapter. First, we will look at
some of the basic ideas that help to understand innovation.

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