Innovation, Creativity, and Design

What components are essential to a successful business? I am sure that innovation, design, and creativity are not the first things that come to mind but they are essential concepts for any successful business. To really understand how these concepts are implemented in the business environment it is important to understand their definitions, how they relate to one another, and how they differ. Once these three concepts are understood an organization can implement the concepts at hand. Innovation is defined as “creativity plus successful implementation” (Stamm, 2003, p. 1). Many great inventors, entrepreneurs, and creative individuals have said that they were the first to come up with an idea or product yet they were not given credit. This is because implementation never happened. The implementation of an idea is probably the most important aspect of innovation because the innovative idea or product will never end up becoming a reality. This is important to all business aspects because the key component of discussing and using innovation to its full potential is the step of implementation. This ensures the ideas being discussed in an organization are being used and that is the most important part to any business. Creativity is defined as “the act of coming up with an idea” (Stamm, 2003, p. 2). The one thing to remember about creativity is that it usually is an individual act and is a hard concept to be taught to all individuals. Although teaching and knowledge of a particular subject can play an important role many times the creativity is lacking for certain individuals and therefore in a business aspect the use of many individuals to brainstorm and discuss new ideas is essential. All businesses need some form of creativity to stay ahead of the competition with new ideas and concepts. It is important for all businesses to have a creative team in place to help the organization reach new and higher levels of success. The definition of design is more complex