Creative Studies: Lesson 2

Creativity, Innovation, Invention, Novelty

This week, we are given a task to define words creativity, innovation, invention and novelty. First, I'm going to define the words creativity. According to the lecture's lesson, creativity is the generation of new ideas or a new way of doing things. While according to wikipedia, it defines creativity as "a mental and social process involving the discovery of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight."

All these four words are closely related to one another. Each of them plays an important role in completing the next process. It began with invention, a process of making a new composition, device, or process. An invention may be derived from a pre-existing model or idea, or it could be independently conceived in which case it may be a radical breakthrough. In addition, there is cultural invention, which is an innovative set of useful social behaviors adopted by people and passed on to others. Inventions often extend the boundaries of human knowledge or experience. A good inventions requires creativity to make that creation possess the quality of novelty in order for that specific creation to last through the time and useful. Novelty, as define in wikipedia is the quality of being new. Although it may be said to have an objective dimension it essentially exists in the subjective perceptions of individuals. It also refers to something novel; that which is striking, original or unusual. The term can have pejorative sense and refer to a mere innovation.

I've heard about a statement stating that only people involved in art industry needs to be creative which is a statement that I not fully agreed to. In my opinion, all career and profession requires creativity that distinguishes their professions from the others. For example, a doctor needs to be creative in order to develop new medicines or treatments that can treat some of the deadliest diseases in the world. People might think that the medical field is all about facts and static theory and that they only need to master all those theory to excelled in this field but in fact it is not. The facts maybe something that have been fixed for many years, but there might be hundreds and thousands of ways to applicate it.

Speaking of developing new ideas and creations, many of the creation and ideas in nowadays are not really 100% new. Many of these ideas are evolved and upgraded from existing ideas, which is also known as a process called innovation. As stated on wikipedia, innovation is a new way of doing something or "new stuff that is made useful". It may refer to incremental and emergent or radical and revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations. I've always seen innovation as an important quality that every industry must have in them to ensure the survival of their industry as the revolution of the time continued. Lacking the quality of innovation will leave one industry being forgotten and existed only in the history just like many huge company that once monopoly the whole indsutry.