You can be both dull and innovative
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Also, over a decade ago but under two decades ago, larger companies also discovered shareholders didn't like the work creativity, so creativity was less re-branded, more cast aside for the noble sounding innovation.
Now we have innovation. Process improvement and incremental change that has existed since before Edward Deming and others started to formalise something, though certainly a modern approach to statistics is useful, and has been under continuous change, and re-branding, since.
I feel the examples in the article, the formerly-known-as 'cutting out the middle man' now re-branded as innovation (SIPOC-focused re-engineering?) or using cheaper cuts of meat/produce (which chefs and kitchens have sought to do since cooking became mainstream in pre-history times) aptly summarise how sweepingly all-encompassing, and correspondingly vapid, the term has become.
- Gustave Flaubert
Of course the exception to this are old-school rock-stars (and the new-school rock-stars: DJ's & Producers). Not jealous of their life expectancy though.
A lot of creative people I know go through cycles and do just fine.
I’m on the extreme end of that due to being bipolar. I have days of extreme productivity and days of none. Likewise with creative ability. They don’t always line up all the time. I can be creative and depressed, or hypomanic but unfocused.
Even with medication, routine does not (and never will) exist for me. Learning to accept chaos and work with it instead of against it was the best thing I ever did for myself.
If I can be creative, I ride it until I need to pull back and let things settle. If I’m not, I work on more boring things like refactoring, testing, and documentation. If I can’t focus at all, I take time off to reduce stress until I recover.
You're absolutely right about cycles and all that. That's how I experience it as well.
>....a hot-swap start-up promises something familiar but better.
I was thinking in this regard about "AI" being hard to trust, as it is inherently a magical black box.
Some startups actually only throw around these terms to get more funding. They may get asked to do more "innovation" with AI when the core system doesn't really need any, so they push more buzzwords into the marketing and maybe tinker a bit with ML on the side.