Rip Off, Repurpose, Repeat
Creativity and innovation are glorious buzzwords, essential marketing fodder these days for any glossy management training brochure or back cover book blurb but what do they really mean?
I got to thinking about this as I’ve just done an inspiring 4-day course entitled Applied Innovation, where creativity was the watchword and innovation was, well, the one that came after applied.
It struck me that I didn’t really understand the difference between these two popular words, and when I don’t understand something, it bugs me.
So, who better to set me to rights than Chris Griffiths, the guy who created the Applied Innovation course, although I’ll be quoting from his best-selling book GRASP The Solution here. Chris says:
Creativity is a fundamental driver for innovation – but what is innovation? It’s ‘the marriage of creative thinking and sound logic, which when applied together, create a solution or direction for one to explore and deliver.’
So Far, So Good, So What?
So far, so good. So it sounds like the two aren’t virtual synonyms, as I’d at first thought. It seems that innovation takes creativity as a starting point and adds to it in some way in order to produce a worthwhile outcome.
Another quote from American economist Theodore Levitt puts it another way:
Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.
OK, I think I’m starting to get it. (The simpler the explanation, the easier it is for this 50-year-old brain to take in – is there a lesson in there somewhere..?)
Creativity is interesting, but innovation is useful.
Thinking Or Doing?
Now let me attack this idea from another angle. I’m reminded of a self-help guru yelling at me to get off my backside and actually Do Something rather than just sit around all day dreaming of future riches and happiness in Never Never Land.
He said: ‘Thinking is mental, doing is physical. And most people think more than they do.’
Then he dropped the killer question: ‘Do you want to succeed in the mental world, or the physical one? Because if it’s the physical one, you have to think less and do more!’
That’s a bit like creating and innovating, isn’t it? Creation involves a lot of mental humming and hahing and baying and baaing, whilst innovation is where we roll up our mental sleeves and get down to the physical business of actually producing something.
Or perhaps creating could result in a concrete outcome but one without much point or obvious usefulness. ‘That’s very nice dear,’ my mother would comment, upon beholding my latest infantile attempt at creativity. ‘Err, what is it?’ Or ‘Yes, but what does it do?’ as my scientifically-minded father would pragmatise.*
It’s only when we start with a problem in mind that we are aiming to solve using original or unexpected approaches that we are truely innovating. That’s how I’m seeing it anyway.
Rip It Up
Enough theoretical waffling. Let me take you back to the title of this article: Rip Off, Repurpose, Repeat.
In this case I ripped off an idea, as the guy I got it from said I could, because it wasn’t even his in the first place. Then I twisted it around a bit to suit my needs and add that vital little bit of me to the final offering.
I gain absolutely no satisfaction in simply serving up someone else’s creation (or innovation) without having Sabbified it in some way.
As a creative person reading these lines, I guess there’s a good chance you feel the same way. In which case simply add ~ify to your name and you have the perfect action-packed verb for making other people’s inspirations your own: Chris Griffiths (I imagine) would tend to Chrisify (not Crucify!), inspiring concepts he comes across; Joan would Joanify, Tom would Tomify and so on.
An interesting idea thus modified will naturally become, in my case, a Sabbification (Chrisification, Joanification, etc.).
But back to this guy’s unoriginal but excellent idea as I saw it. His idea was to write a book… without actually writing anything at all.
The guy’s one of my virtual mentors called Alex Mandossian and he’s used an interesting book creation system found at the THINKaha website.
What you do is supply them with 140 pithy quips or quotes of your choice of no more than… 140 characters in length and they’ll do the rest.
The production process is even quicker as there’s no back page or dedication, no fawning foreword or cheesy endorsements, not even acknowledgements or section introductions – just the 140 ahas, as they call them, and a front cover.
You get your name on the title page of course, despite not haven’t done much more than hit the copy and paste command… 140 times.
And The Answer Is… 140!
Not much of a book you may be thinking; yes, but –Aha!– that’s kind of the point. It’s a book for today’s ADD-challenged, quick-fix, 140 character attention span. 140 characters? Aha! It’s sponsored by Twitter, that’s it!
No, it’s not sponsored by Twitter but each of the ahas, in the PDF format at least, is eminently Tweetable, along with an inbuilt @namedrop or #hashtag, for sure.
(Click any of the images on this page, and see what happens, he he! ?)
So anyway, I didn’t do that. Why not? Not personal enough. Just someone else’s stuff encased in someone else’s format. Me no do dat. Instead I ripped off ahem! ‘borrowed’ the idea and repurposed. For what purpose? For my purpose. I Sabbified it.
Alex called his book Alexisms: Useful Life Lessons From A Recovering Serial Entrepreneur, and you can download the full PDF for free by clicking here so check it out!
He actually did end up adding a bit of preamble, a few section headings and pics and even a promotional page at the end, so hey, he Alexified it, and good for him!
Personally, I loved the idea but didn’t like the format. And the rest, as they say… is Sabisms. I won’t describe what I’ve done with it so far because you can see some examples here on this page. Like this one:
Hopefully this article will have given you a few ideas to chew on. Being creative and innovative is essentially about taking stuff that’s already out there, adding your own special secret sauce (with a sneaky little idea in the back of your mind) and coming up with something unique and useful that didn’t exist before.
Let me finish by completing the circle and proffering my own home-baked definition of the terrible Creativity & Innovation twosome, whilst still not really saying what the difference between them is, because I prefer it that way (seems such a shame to separate them…):
Creativity & Innovation (according to me) is…
Drawing on your life experiences and – why not – other people’s interesting ideas, throwing in a few unexpected ingredients of your own, mixing the whole lot together into one almighty mishmash of strangeness and charm, and coming out the other end with something that actually makes someone else’s life a little better in some way.
A bit long-winded, I admit (but I am) and it’ll do for now. And it’s mine!
Notes
Sab Will writes about creativity in business and life.
As well as Creative Business Mind (this site!) he runs I Create Therefore I Am (general creativity), Mind Map Mad (mind mapping & visual problem solving) and Fun English Lessons (an on-line language learning site).
Sab is available for training in innovative thinking, creative problem solving, mind mapping and professional English language training. Please get in touch here to find out how increased creativity and innovation can help boost your business.
*Although some of my ‘quotes’ have been liberally paraphrased, if not just completely made up, I assure you that no members of my family or inner circle were injured or mistreated during the writing of this article… ?
© 2015 Sab Will / Creative Business Mind