Creativity is overrated

For a long time now we've been told that to be "creative" is cool. Creative folks are the people who come up with the snappy patter, the cool mantras, interesting user interfaces, best new ideas. Well, I guess that's all true, as far as it goes. My question is: So what?

I don't want a really well articulated idea on paper. I want a new product or service or feature. Being creative and generating a lot of ideas is almost pointless if those ideas merely fall by the wayside.

Instead of celebrating the folks who generate ideas, we should celebrate the people who can take a raw idea and evolve it and incubate it through a system or methodology until it's ready to be used, consumed or implemented by a customer. That's when the idea has real value.

Take a look at any marcom or advertising firm. Most of them will have one or two "visionaries" who generate the next big thing. They come up with the ideas. After that, there are marketing people, marcom people, messaging people, production people, operations people and others who are charged with making the vision a reality. In other words, there's probably a 1:10 relationship between the folks who simply create the ideas and those it takes to fully flesh out and package the idea in a way that others can use it. So, it seems to me that the "hard work" of creativity (and by analogy innovation) is in the methodology and process.

Most people can be creative, if by creative we mean coming up with an interesting new idea or vision. But in most "creative" firms there are one or two primary creative people backed by many "operations" and "production" people who make the idea workable. These are the people we should celebrate. Creativity is interesting but not particularly useful by itself, since without the means of production most ideas don't become valuable goods and services.

Let's stop focusing on the "creative people" and start focusing on the innovation process.