Creativity vs Innovation —The silver linings of the pandemic year 2020

Creativity vs Innovation —The silver linings of the pandemic year 2020

Analysing few key players of the year to decipher the difference!

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First things first, let’s understand the dictionary definition of the two terms..

Creativity

Creativity is an abstract concept that can relatively be thought experiments within an individual’s mind interacting via one’s sense of perception, taste, smell, touch or sound. It is further an amalgamation of a host of personal traits such as intelligence, novelty of ideas, knowledge, creative instinct etc.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge.” — Einstein

Since childhood, we are taught to be creative in our thinking, in order to develop a creative mindset. But, how can we preach this intangible concept?

This leads to the pathway for Innovation..

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Innovation

Innovation, on the other hand is not an abstract concept. What creativity is to mindful of ideas, innovation is to putting those ideas in practical use.

For innovation to happen, creativity is a key process to perceive the need for change. This in turn drives the external forces to make the idea viable, analysing risks and challenges.

Therefore, at present times often these two critical terms are seen to possess a symbiotic relationship, and better known as Creative Innovation.

Creativity is imagination, Innovation is application, and Creative Innovation is smart adoption and implementation.

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Let’s take a moment to analyse a few business players that we witnessed in the pandemic year 2020. What was their creativity, innovation, or it would be more apt to regard it as a creative innovation.

Zoom

Zoom — the video conferencing app, was into existence with a few million users even before the world was hit by COVID. But, were the most of us aware?

No, right? Yet in recent times, it is used by kids, parents, co-workers and even grandparents. It has been an indispensable medium to host meetings, online classes, Zumba sessions, birthdays or to even host virtual wedding ceremony.

According to the leading daily Hindu, “The company’s profit sky-rocketed to USD 27.0 million compared to USD 0.2 million in the year-ago quarter.”

So what was the X-factor with Zoom Video that the other competing teleconferencing providers were short of?

Yes, the ease of use primarily with a host of features such as recording, fake backgrounds, high quality calls, screen annotation, free minutes to unprecedented number of users, but it all costed to security and privacy concerns as the number of users spiked, who were not regulated by enterprise regulations, basically the Zoom customer base prior the pandemic.

The creativity of Zoom is no doubt promising to the present trends, the innovation with regard to privacy concerns has also been quite impressive. Zoom acquired Keybase recently to enhance the end-to-end encryption of user data and shipped the updated features in a newer version. Still, the notion of creative innovation stands deep rooted as Zoom sparked a ray of hope in these dark times and would continually try to maintain its position.

Now, speaking of creative innovation, my fellow Indians will remember JioMeet. The Indian counterpart of Zoom, comes with a pretty similar UI as Zoom but with a bunch of differences too.

Initially, JioMeet was bashed for having the strikingly same landing page UI and other options as Zoom on social platforms. But, if we tilt our head a bit, one can realise how Jio has creatively rather smartly combined the popular features of the existing market player and innovated its own novel features such as multi-device login and safe driving mode. Well, that’s what smart work vs hard work is? Isn’t it? — I’ll leave it to my readers to interpret!

Cred

Getting rewards for paying credit card bills! — Yes, this has been proved by CRED

The Freecharge founder — Kunal Shah launched Cred inspired by developed nations with self-checkout counters with no cashiers.

Kunal strives to establish a huge trust-web among individuals with maximum plausible transparency by showcasing zero hidden charges and also to reward such creditworthy individuals from his pocket!

But, at what cost? How do they generate revenue?

Yes, this is an alarming question for the IPL’s official partner. Do they charge from banks? Or from ads or profits from captive cash? Or more worse, do they sell the insights of your financial data?

As per the present reports, CRED is not making any profits. It is backed up by a few angel investors and has partnered with brands such as AirBnB and BookMyShow. It is focused on building a backbone of trust among its millions of customers who are credit card users.

So, everything is fine but why the tacky laughable ads featuring mid-aged 90s BTown personalities?

Well the answer can be creativity of self deprecation as humor — new ad concept in India. The innovation can be depicted as targeting a mass audience by portraying the young and the not so young generation with incentive gains of course!

The creative innovation lies in the idea to make the whole campaign brand specific instead of celebrity specific in order to gain the trust of common people and promise a transparency.

Even their careers site claim to be transparent enough! Have a look 👀

Writing this piece for The Sparks Foundation content development internship (GRIP).

Will come up with the case study of a few more popular projects in my next article. Chandrika Deb - Software Engineering Associate - Amdocs | LinkedIn Software Engineering Associate at Amdocs, India focused with a goal-driven work ethic. Recently graduated in 2020 from…linkedin.com