Creativity AND Innovation

There are several terms used in the field of practice called creativity that bug me. I can't stand the term; "aha!"for example. The term that bugs me the most is "creativity and innovation.". I think use of this term by practitioners does them and the field a disservice because it skates over deeper definitions of the two concepts by tying them together in this way. It's that lazy way we join related concepts together when we can't quite figure out what we are trying to communicate. A popular way of being imprecise is when we use the term "slash" or "stroke" (character /) to compound two concepts when we are not sure if it's either concept or a third concept that is related somehow to the original two concepts. I'm struggling to think of a good example of this and will edit this post when I come up with a better example than: "mother stroke father."

Michael Kirton offers an interesting way out of the sloppy use of the term "creativity and innovation" when he reduces creativity to problem solving: "the brain doesn't know it's being creative. It only knows it's solving problems....". He reserves the term "innovation" for one of the two ways the brain approaches problem solvng in which it reaches outside the framing of the presented problem. Although this is an elegant solution to some of the sloppiness, it doesn't cut the mustard for my particular campaign because innovation is defined by most of the thoughtful people I have encountered as something to do with the execution of an idea.