Week 4 Reading Reflection

This week we had to read "Innovation: The Creative Pursuit of Ideas" and reflect on it. The author talked about the relationship between creativity and entrepreneurship. Creativity is something that you learn, not something that you are born with, necessarily-just like entrepreneurship. Some people are more creative than other. They are talented and create things every day. However, this is not what it takes to be creative, which is to have a charisma. Creativity is a set of mind. You need to look the world in a way that others don't see it. As the text mentions, in order to develop a creative mind you need to try "perceiving things in a relational mode"; connecting things together and understanding how certain things can be interrelated. In other word, learn how things affect other things. In addition to this, the author mentioned "developing a functional perspective toward things and people" which means to understand how things work, so that you can easily adapt into certain conditions. For example, when you cannot open a can with the proper tool, use an alternative tool/solution than can do the same thing. Therefore, thinking alternatives is another thing that helps improve creativity. I can certainly say that I have become more creative with the above techniques and the exposure to creativity, in general. Last summer I took a course called "Innovation in Context" in which my classmates and I had to think creatively and create a product/idea/service that would be beneficial to the community, something that entrepreneurs also do. I really loved this course because we could synthesize all the available resources we had to create something new or even improve something that already existed.

Some things I do not agree with the writer in a large extent. For example, when the author differentiates adaptors and innovators. I don't believe that adaptors do not contribute into big innovations. Adaptors, in my view, make small changes to a product or service, which is why it takes them a longer time to get to the best solution. Innovators look at these changes, learn from the adaptor's problems and that's how they get to the best solution. So, I believe that in order for innovators to exist, there must be some people that don't think as hard as them, these being the adaptors. Adaptors find a solution to a problem that is most probably temporary till another problem pops up. That happens with innovators as well, though. If innovators develop something big, the creation is still vulnerable to failure. Innovators and adaptors have the same information available. How they'll exploit this information is their main difference.