There is an important relationship between creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship. In fact, creativity is the ability to develop new ideas and to discover new ways of looking at problems and opportunities; innovation is the ability to apply creative solutions to those problems and opportunities in order to enhance people’s lives or to enrich society. Entrepreneurship is a result of a disciplined and systematic process of applying creativity and innovations to needs and opportunities in the marketplace.
Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. All products or services are the combination of three factors: nature raw materials, labor (physical and mental) and capital. Entrepreneurs, as innovators, are people who create new combinations of these factors and then present to the market for assessment by consumers.
Porter (1985) argues that, while successful businesses will each employ their own strategy, they achieve competitive advantage through acts of innovation. Innovation requires three basic components: the infrastructure; the capital, and the entrepreneurial capacity needed to make the first two work. Moreover, innovation has to address market needs, and requires entrepreneurship if it is to achieve commercial success. For this reason, it is important to introduce in the analysis the role played by the entrepreneur and to determine those elements or factors that would have any effect on him.
Entrepreneurship and innovation are strictly related to each other and help an organization to prosper. They are also complementary, as a combination of the two might be vital to corporate success and sustainability in the environment of today, which is dynamic and changing. In additions, entrepreneurship and innovation are not confined to the initial stages of a new venture; but they are present in every process of every stage of a business venture.
Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining others and ourselves. In order to be creative, you need to be able to view things in new ways or from a different perspective to become able to generate new possibilities or new alternatives. The ability to generate alternatives or to see things uniquely does not occur by change; it is linked to other qualities of thinking, such as flexibility, tolerance of ambiguity or unpredictability, and the enjoyment of knowing things. Thus, creativity is the development of ideas about new products, practices, services, or procedures that are potentially useful to the organization.
Creative thinking has various definitions; it is the art of generating solution to problems by the force of imagination and reasoning. It is an activity of the mind seeking to find answer to some of life’s questions. In our dynamic and changing world, the challenges of man are also not static. They take on new forms and require a deep creative thinking approach. Every idea is a product of thinking and every product is the manifestation of idea naked in a thinker’s mind.