Defining Novelty, Creativity, Innovation and Invention - Week 3

Novelty:
- A state or quality of being original, new, different, or unique.
- The quality of being novel; newness.

Creativity:
- The state or quality of being creative.
- The ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc. ; originality, progressiveness, or imagination.
- Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative.

Innovation:
- Something new or different introduced.
- The act of innovating; introduction of new things or methods.

Invention:
- The act or process of inventing.
- Anything invented or devised.
- The power or faculty of inventing, devising, or originating.
- An act or instance of creating or producing by exercise of the imagination, esp. in art, music, etc.
- A new device, method, or process developed from study and experimentation.
- A discovery; a finding.

Definitions from Dictionary.com

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Based on all the words above, the definition is quite similar to each other. We will go through every word one-by-one to have a better and clearer understanding of each word.

First of all, let's take a look at the word novelty. Novelty means something new or unusual that is created. One of the examples are: Twitter (invented by Jack Dorsey). In the era of social networking, twitter is slightly different from other social networks like Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, etc. Twitter is a simple text-based that can post up to 140 characters to tell people about some updates from yourself and can be viewed by the subscribers/follower.

Twitter can be considered as novelty

Creativity can be defined as creating by using imagination rather than imitating something else. The example of creativity that I found is the McDonald's (McD's) advertisements. McD's ads have been created all over the world in every approaches like poster, newspaper ad, billboard and so on. It have becomes very popular because McD is the world's largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurant and to maintain its standard, great ads accompany their product.

A cow on a trampoline? Now that's a real milkshake! :p
For more creative ads from McDonald's, click here.

On the other hand, Innovation is creating something out of current situation for the better in the future. The creation of new and unusual vacuum cleaners is what can be call as innovation. It can help people to clean small and certain difficult places easily. A plain, old vacuum cleaner is bulky and hard to move around. Now, the new vacuum cleaners are created with more variety to choose from to suit people needs.

The Zamboni Desk Vacuum is an innovation
To see more unusual vacuum cleaners, click here.

Lastly, invention is a discovery or creation of something new in sense of idea, divide or process. Some are based on existing models or ideas and make a simple modification to it.

An invention to quickly cool down the hot noodles while eating.

References:
http://dictionary.com
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twitter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's
http://www.toxel.com/
http://www.fresh99.com/weird-inventions.htm