Picking Flowers, Collecting Trash

I was a daydreamer drifter when I was about six years old, and that may not have been a good thing.

Back in 1956 in Cleveland Heights children could walk the mile alone to school through the neighborhood and I would explore on the way home. Every yard was a mystery and every house was to be investigated. That was at least 50 houses by estimate now. I bet I knew every stone and brick, every crevice over that year.

Another interest I had was gardens, and the flowers in them were apparently for sharing because I would bring one or two home everyday throughout the springtime to my mother, Sue. She probably was trying her best to curtail that behavior, but I finally won her over one day with a big bunch of tuplips from our side yard by the driveway.

The best outdoor activity at the time, in my six-year-old estimation, was trash day. This was not garbage day, but once a week people put clearance from basements and attics on their lawns for pickup. In order to get a head start on the crew coming by truck, I left the house somewhere around 6 a.m. in the dark to pick through the treasures. I came home with assortments of things I would put in my upstairs glassed-in porch that was my personal space for thinking and working. Sue, and my dad Rodger, really wanted me to stop going out of the house before they were awake, but I just could not see the logic in that - how would I get these special items if I did not get outside before the trash collectors!

Life as a child was an adventure always and it still makes me happy to this day to take simple steps to observe the wonderful world around me and all of its mysteries.

Innovation = Dollars?

To continue on the creativity vs innovation theme I found this web site that says: "Think more creatively ~ innovate more profitably!"

So the web site, called Jenni, says it can help you and your company get your arms around this: "Idea management is a structured innovation process for capturing ideas from across a large group of people - such as your employees - and evaluating those ideas in order to identify the most promising. Jenni is a combination of software (which runs on the web) and human support that provides idea management through ideas campaigns.
An Ideas campaign is a structured process we have developed for idea management. Moreover, we believe it is the most effective, most sustainable and most motivational approach to idea management available. That's why we developed it and have used it as a model for Jenni idea management.

Honestly, the thought of having this kind of bureaucracy imposed around my idea generation makes me not want to do it in an environment this structured where someone is going to put it through hoops for profit. The question for me still remains - how do you define creativity vs innovation - because I do not want making money be related to whether something is innovative or not.