Creativit y is good.

“CREATIVITY IS NOT enough.” So wrote influential American economist and professor Theodore Levitt in the Harvard Business Review in 1963. Levitt argued that creativity (“thinking up new things”), far from being a miraculous road to business growth and affluence, can actually be destructive to businesses, inspiring a culture of abstract chatter, not purposeful action. Instead he championed innovation (“doing new things”), taking a new idea and turning it into a market offering.

The difference is a critical one. The greatest business successes have come not from “thinking new”, but from “making/doing new”.

Obviously the two aren’t unconnected, but if creativity = ideas, then innovation = ideas + action.

Taking Levitt’s ideas one step further, there is an argument that New Zealand isn't short of creative people, we are short of innovators – people who follow through to create amazing businesses. This may be true to some extent. However, if the winners of the 2014 New Zealand Innovators Awards (A Celebration of Innovation, page 48) are anything to go by, the problem is far from terminal.

In the four years Idealog has been involved in the awards, we’ve seen entries grow ten-fold to a record 300 this year, and the number of evaluators needed has soared. This year the evaluation involved a 24-person team and over 900 bits of feedback.

The winners are an awe-inspiring tribute to the innovation potential – and reality – of New Zealand’s best companies.

Take the supreme winner. Precision Seafood Harvesting, a partnership between three fishing companies and the Ministry of Primary Industries, has rethought millennia of fishing practice to come up with a net-free solution that allows undersize fish to escape while still in the water, and unwanted species to be returned to the sea unscathed from the boat.

It’s an idea the partners hope will change the way New Zealand – and eventually the world – catches fish. Actually, it’s not just an idea. Over $50 million of investment later, Precision Seafood Harvesting’s flexible PVC fishing tubes are being beta tested on board Kiwi trawlers.

Meanwhile, Gallagher Group takes the inaugural “sustained innovation excellence” award – for 50 years of turning industrychanging ideas into award-winning commercial products.

But that’s not all. This issue also has the Best of the Best – our pick of the Designers Institute award winners (on page 66). There are some beautiful, classy ideas, but just as important, some amazing products making money for their creators.

Read and be innovative.