Are balance and innovation mutually exclusive? Follow this link to find out more...

"Creativity thinks up new things. Innovation does new things." - Prof T. Levitt, quoted in Michael E Gerber's The E-Myth Revisited.

There seems to be a big gap between creativity and innovation, and the required hard work to be innovative. Why do we expect others to pick up on our good ideas, when we are the only ones with the passion to drive them?

Perhaps the discord is that it is easy to be creative, but difficult to be innovative. And with so many stimuli in our busy world, creative ideas come quickly but being able to follow through takes commitment and drive, and takes up the most precious commodity that we have to offer, time.

If you are a creative person, at least spend the time writing down your good ideas with a date and time, and adding to them as your ideas develop. Then you can explore them and bit-by-bit, make those ideas a reality.

Of course you can go more hard core and commit to taking your ideas to market. In that case, it is good to tap into the available resources: coaches, mentors, entrepreneurs with experience and eco-systems. There is no need to try to go it alone.

A cliche from VC's is that if it is such a good idea, someone else has probably already thought of it somewhere in the world, and if nobody has you should probably be worried, as there might be no need for it.
But don't be discouraged either way. Go out and find that competition, and see if your idea is better, or how you can improve on that idea and make it a reality.

Bottom line, challenge yourself today to move from being creative to being an innovator. - Marius