Although creativity and innovation are inextricably related, there are some differences between them. In the context of this article we will define them as:

• Creativity: The quality of being creative, the imaginative ability required to create something new rather than imitate.

• Innovation: The introduction of something new, a new idea, method, or device.

According to these definitions, the difference between creativity and innovation is that the first concept is related to the production of ideas and the second to the introduction of those ideas. In other words: innovation is to put creative ideas into action.

The problem concerning creativity and innovation is that they imply different mental schemas to work. In fact, these two mental schemas are even biologically separated by anatomy. The human brain is separated by a longitudinal fissure, splitting the brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres. The two sides of the brain are similar in appearance, and every structure in each hemisphere is mirrored on the other side, yet despite these gross similarities, the functions of each cortical hemisphere are different. Reasoning functions are often lateralized to the left hemisphere of the brain. In contrast, artistic ability and music functions seem to be generally lateralized to the right hemisphere. Accordingly, to be creative we need to use our right brains; however to be innovative we have to land down to the ground, be reasonable, logical, and this means to use our left hemisphere.

From this perspective it becomes clear that creativity - per se - is not enough. We need innovation, we need to act on those ideas, and, as we already said, to act is blended with knowledge. Furthermore, this cognitive science based framework implies something very important: both creativity and innovation are entangled with knowledge, and therefore, to manage knowledge unavoidably implies to manage these two concepts.


Paradigms

The word 'paradigm' was used in ancient Greece to mean an example, a model. The word was recovered by T. S. Kuhn is his 1962 book "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions". According to that book, science is not developed in a smooth straightforward ascending path, but rather it advances in steps or leaps called "scientific revolutions".

Of course science is always developing new theories and conceptions, but those do not challenge the grounds of the whole scientific building, unless we are in front of an actual paradigm shift. A paradigm is a whole way of thinking and viewing the world. Paradigms include theories, principles, beliefs, and - sometimes - even doctrines and values.

The biggest block to creativity at any level is the paradigm. This is because of one very simple reason: paradigms work at a very deep level; usually, we are not aware of our own paradigms. A paradigm can be thought of as a rather rigid, tacit, infrastructure of ideas that shape not only our thinking but our whole perception of the world.


Paradigm shift

During a scientific revolution two paradigms coexist at the same time, the older, usually supported by oldest scientists, and the newer, usually supported by a new generation of researchers. Thus, the paradigm shift does not occur by the younger convincing the older that they are wrong, on the contrary, the old paradigm usually dies along with their supporters.

Joel Barker discovered that the concept of paradigms, which at that time was sequestered within the scientific discussion, could explain revolutionary change in all areas of human endeavour. He began his work in 1975 after spending a year on fellowship meeting and working with visionary thinkers in both North America and Europe, and he was the first person to popularize the concept of paradigm shifts for the corporate world.

Nevertheless, in business we expect that the new paradigm can be introduced without waiting for the supporters of the older to pass away. Scholars and managers have developed some techniques that can be used to manage change (called "change management") and therefore we can increase significantly the effectiveness and speed of a paradigm shift inside a firm.


Constructivism and Radical Constructivism

The philosopher Thomas Kuhn credited Piaget's work in helping him understand the transition between modes of thought which characterized his theory of paradigm shifts.

Piaget was a revolutionary psychologist who disagreed with the traditional views that considered play as aimless and of little importance for children's cognitive development. On the contrary, he saw play as an important and necessary and even provided scientific evidence for his views. He suggested that through processes of accommodation and assimilation, individuals construct new knowledge from their experiences.

• Assimilation occurs when individuals' experiences are aligned with their internal representation of the world. They assimilate the new experience into an already existing framework.
• Accommodation is the process of reframing one's mental representation of the external world to fit new experiences.

Accommodation can be understood as the mechanism by which failure leads to learning. When we act on the expectation that the world operates in one way and it violates our expectations, we often fail. By accommodating this new experience and reframing our model of the way the world works, we learn from the experience of failure. In his 1955 work "The Construction of Reality in the Child", Piaget said that:

… "as the child’s thought evolves, assimilation and accommodation are differentiated and become increasingly complementary. In the realm of representation of the world this means, on the one hand, that accommodation, instead of remaining on the surface of experience, penetrates it more and more deeply, that is, under the chaos of appearances it seeks regularities and becomes capable of real experimentations to establish them. On the other hand, assimilation, instead of reducing phenomena to the concepts inspired by personal activity, incorporates them in the system of relationships rising from the more profound activity of intelligence itself. True experience and deductive construction thus become simultaneously separate and correlative, whereas in the social realm the increasingly close adjustment of personal thought to that of others and the reciprocal formation of relationships of perspectives insures the possibility of a cooperation that constitutes precisely the environment that is favourable to this elaboration of reason".


What is knowledge?

In the early 1960s, John Holt wrote his original book "How Children Learn", bringing the revolutionary ideas of Jean Piaget to a broader audience. He pointed out that:

"We think that we can take a picture, a structure, a working model of something, constructed in our minds out of long experience and familiarity, and by turning that model into a string of words, transplant it whole into the mind of someone else. Perhaps once in a thousand times, when the explanation is extraordinary good, and the listener extraordinary experienced and skilful at turning word strings into non-verbal reality, and when the explainer and listener share many of the experiences being talked about, the process may work, and some real meaning may be communicated. Most of the time, explaining does not increase understanding, and may even lessen it."

Constructivism views all of our knowledge as "constructed", because it does not reflect any external "transcendent" realities; it is contingent on convention, human perception, and social experience. Constructivists hold that representations of physical and biological reality - including race, sexuality, and gender - are socially constructed.

Ernst von Glasersfeld is a prominent proponent of radical constructivism, which claims that the process of constructing knowledge regulates itself, and since knowledge is a construct rather than a compilation of empirical data, it is impossible to know the extent to which knowledge reflects an ontological reality.

According to this point of view, knowledge evolves and is not eternal or fixed in any way. What shapes it, is its appropriateness. Knowledge should give an individual or an organization something useful to properly act, something like a business advantage. If it does not, that information will be no longer knowledge. In other words: it will perish like an organism in the environment.


Informational resources

In the context of this article, we will use the phrase "informational resources" to globally consider both data, information and knowledge. Sometimes "wisdom" is also added to that list, but we will exclude it here for practical reasons.

What informational resources have in common is clearly stated by the very name. "Resources" mean that they are natural sources of wealth or revenue for the company. "Informational" means that both data and knowledge are related to information. In fact, there is a kind of hierarchy that relates them establishing what is called a complexity order, being data the simplest and knowledge (or even wisdom) the more complex.

Here are the definitions to each informational resource type:

• Data: A set of datum, each of them composed of an attribute and a value. For instance, the age of John Smith is 38 is a datum being "the age of John Smith" the attribute and "38" the value.

• Information: Data processed in such a way that brings out something useful for taking decisions. The "process" can be divided in two phases: data analysis and information synthesis, and can be very complex or very simple. For instance, the current value of all the stocks in Wall Street are just data, but the average, given that it would be helpful to decide something concerning stocks, would be information.

• Knowledge: The ability to handle information to get desirable results. For instance, you may have the knowledge of how to apply the capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to determine a theoretically appropriate required rate of return.

The difference between information and knowledge is that the first must be useful to take decisions and the second to "do the right." For instance, if the CAPM hypothetically proves to be a useless technique, it automatically ceases to be proper knowledge and becomes mere information. It ceases to be knowledge because it is no longer useful to do the right, but it still remains as information because it is useful to take decisions (the decision of NOT using it!).

The definition of knowledge as the ability to "do the right", more properly called "effective action", is not only applied in management, but also in cognitive science, and plays a fundamental role in the Autopoiesis theories (See Autopoiesis and Knowledge in the Organization: Conceptual Foundation For Authentic Knowledge Management by Limone & Bastías).

According to this definition, proper knowledge is inextricably bound up with competence, performance and skilfulness. In other words, you can have provide the most valuable information to a person, but if he/she fails to do anything useful with it, she/he does not have real knowledge. This is the reason why knowledge management plays such a fundamental role in the firm, because to manage knowledge is to manage competence and performance.

Copyright © 2007 by Luis E. Bastias.
Copyright © 2007 by The Working Manager, Ltd.
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