Being creative to avoid innovation

This is an interesting dilemma. Some people exhibit great creativity in order to avoid innovation. A simplistic view of creativity is that artists are creative because they have a lot of freedom to come up with crazy stuff, and that engineers are not creative because they work on highly complex and constrained problems. This can be challenged easily.

In large engineering projects, sometimes people have to exhibit large degrees of creativity in order to face pressing problems in production or construction. Ironically, some of these emergencies are triggered by small changes in design. The thing is that these engineers need to be really creative to try and stop 'change propagation'. This happens even in companies that considered themselves as 'not innovative'... and is something that also in contexts of limited resources you see all the time: very clever solutions to make-do and overcome scarcity.

My students have identified a similar dilemma regarding 'dissent': you can be a dissenter in order to trigger change in a system, but you can also use dissent to avoid change initiatives.

Creativity aint a straightforward topic...


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