Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Creativity, history, and entrepreneurship
Creativity, history, and entrepreneurship
Nov 25, 2024 11:46 PM

Joseph Sunde recently posted a substantive introduction to and elaboration of a paper I co-authored with Victor Claar, “Creativity, innovation, and the historicity of entrepreneurship,” in the Journal of Entrepreneurship & Public Policy.

The idea for this paper arose out of reflection on a previous article I wrote with Victor, “The Soul of the Entrepeneur: A Christian Anthropology of Creativity, Innovation, and Liberty,” in the Journal of Ethics & Entrepreneurship. In that earlier piece, we discussed the “creativity” and “innovation,” but we weren’t satisfied with the clarity of the relationship and distinction between the two.

This more recent piece picks up on and develops this distinction, and uses the perspectives of history and ontology to do so. What we conclude is that it is helpful to think about “creativity” in relationship to creation, understood in a fundamental and primal sense. Human beings exercise creativity as a derivative and secondary reality and response to some prior and primal reality. For Christians, certainly, this human creativity is a manifestation of humanity’s creation in the image of God. We create on the basis of what God has created. This is what might be understood as the ontology of entrepreneurship.

Innovation, on the other hand, can be understood more historically as something that is done on the basis of what has been done before. Innovation is iterative in a way that creativity is not. Innovation depends on adapting, updating, changing, remixing what has been done by others. Creativity is about plumbing the depths of possibility that are latent in creation. We innovate on the basis of what other people have innovated. This is what might be called the historicity of entrepreneurship.

This distinction between creation and innovation is in some ways conceptual. That is, we might look at some human invention and see aspects of it that reflect creativity in this deep sense of discovering something radically new. We might also see how that artifact builds upon and adapts artifacts of human culture that precede it. So this distinction between creativity and innovation is not intended to be absolute. Rather, we hope it will help to clarify plex and interrelated aspects of all human action that is productive. We conclude with some thoughts about how this distinction might pay off in terms of approaches to entrepreneurship, which may emphasize iterative as opposed to radically new entrepreneurial activities.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Freedom to give
The Salvation Army Bell Ringers are now audibly calling us to seasonal charitable giving. But the pleas from multiple organizations for our benevolence—from both unprecedented terrorist attacks and natural disasters to the ever-present needs of our less fortunate neighbors—have been virtually ongoing since 9/11. However, amidst all the research about how much Americans give and who needs what the most, and the gloom and doom rhetoric of so-called donor fatigue, it is appropriate to appreciate another principle as important as...
God and man in the environmental debate
In this week’s Acton Commentary, Jay Richards looks at the ingrained tendency of many environmentalists to view man’s place in nature as fundamentally destructive. For people of faith, this is simply bad theology. Jay examines this anthropological error, and highlights the work of the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, a new coalition that is working to deepen religious reflection on environmental questions. Environmental policies founded on faulty fundamentals can lead to disastrous consequences, as Jay points out. Every environmental policy implemented by...
The true cost of everyday low prices
A consensus has developed among activists on the left that Wal-Mart is bad for America, and particularly bad for the poor, not only in America (where wages are supposedly driven down) but also abroad (where suppliers allegedly abuse and exploit their workers). Check out this litany of social harms alleged to be caused by Wal-Mart. The organization piled that list – Wal-Mart Watch – even has a “faith resource guide” that pastors can use to whip up anti-Wal-Mart sentiment within...
Politics 101
The first lesson of Politics 101: When in trouble, look to your base. That’s what House Speaker Dennis J. Hastert is apparently doing, in his recent push to make sure the lighted tree put up in December on the U.S. Capitol be returned to its name of the last decade, the “Capitol Christmas Tree.” Its name had been the stunningly interesting and descriptive “Holiday Tree.” You can expect any court cases involved over so-called “Christmas” trees to find the primarily...
Instant classics
This made me think of this. If the British pany were really smart, they’d just negotiate a price to use the Book-A-Minute Classics. The versions are a bit different, though. Here’s Dante’s Inferno: “Some woman puts Dante through Hell. THE END.” These are really quite good. I especially like the War and Piece classic. ...
Chafuen on Latin America’s problem
What, exactly, was the point of the recent Summit of the Americas in Argentina? President Bush’s participation there seemed to plish little more than to excite street mobs and vandals. And then there was Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, doing his best Fidel impersonation as he led opposition to a U.S.-backed free trade agreement. Alejandro Chafuen, president of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, uses the occasion of the summit to succinctly catalog the ills that plague Latin America. “With few exceptions,”...
Maimonides: Healing is a basic religious duty
A good story on Moses Maimonides in this weekend’s Washington Post, “The Doctor Is Still In: Medieval Rabbi-Healer Maimonides Linked Body, Soul.” A key contention is that Jewish doctors like Maimonides “associated healing with basic religious duty.” The main source for the article is author Sherwin Nuland, whose most recent book is on Maimonides. While Nuland caricatures Christians in opposition to Jewish religious interest in healing, the perspective is a valuable one. The article does note that beyond Nuland’s interest...
The digital divide in the developing world
A key barrier to economic growth in the developing world is reliable access to the global information network: the Internet. A UN-sponsored study, “Information Economy Report 2005” by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, (PDF) shows that one of the features of the digital divide between the developing and the developed world has to do with the cost of high-bandwidth Internet access. The report says “that the smaller, e Internet markets in developing countries, particularly in Africa, have...
Disaster relief updates
On my drive to work this morning, I began wondering about all those relief efforts that were launched after the December 2004 Tsunami disaster in Southeast Asia. So I started the day at the office by looking for reports/numbers online, trying to find some indication of how money was being spent and what progress was being made. I found a great website called ReliefWeb which has really opened my eyes to the hundreds of other problems around the world that...
‘Addio, Dolce Vita’
That’s the title of this week’s survey of Italy in The Economist. The news for Italy is quite depressing. Its economic growth is the slowest in Europe, behind even France and Germany, its productivity is down while its wages are up, and a massive demographic crisis looms. The survey is extensive, covering the structural, political and even cultural impediments today’s Italy faces. These include a tendency to blame Europe and China for Italian woes, an over-reliance on small- and medium-sized...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2024 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved