Both.
If you start making something first and start making it well, you get ahead. You stick to it, fine-tuning and ensuring quality never wanes. There is no need to innovate or think creatively because you dominate the market. It’s unimaginable that anyone else can make it better, and no one ever does.
No one makes it better than you but, what they do is innovate to the degree that no one needs your well-made thing anymore.
Let’s say that a business produced overhead transparency projectors that illuminated and enlarged information for classrooms and lecture halls. They made them well, each year announcing the new model’s improved quality and features.
But no one needs a transparency projector anymore when digital projectors that connect to computers cast vivid PowerPoint presentations for the purpose of lectures and teaching on the wall. What happens? Defensiveness kicks in and things like ‘Well you can’t draw diagrams as easily as on a transparency’ are said as the makers of the threatened product desperately try to justify it. This only further highlights the lack of innovative thinking, because, if something else came this far, wouldn’t they find a great solution to diagram drawing as well? And at best, they start to play catch-up and try to adapt to retain some sales.
Either someone innovated on overhead projectors, or worse, innovation in an unrelated industry (in this case cinema or photographic) wipes them out. Regardless of how it came to be, it wins because of a lack of innovation on the side of the overhead projector business. The interesting thing is they most likely pride themselves in their successful tradition (how we’ve always done things), which is just a great sounding blocker of innovation, or adaption at the least.
When it’s going well, it’s time to innovate.
Innovation is generally a more acceptable term for the creative process. It’s healthy to ask yourself, ‘how do we level up?’ or in the case of the projectors, ‘what if the presenter didn’t have to physically change the slide every time?” (More on HOW to practically do this HERE) And then run with the seemingly silly suggestions that would be put on the table, and consider each one with incredible seriousness, thinking about what the outcome might be, and how one would achieve each one. If valid and almost possible, then there is something there.
Now that we see the value of innovation, it is vital that we never question quality or see it as less important. You can not have innovation or creativity alone either. Without the baseline of quality, it’ll never take off. Lots of wonderful ideas fail when it comes to the quality of the application. Quality is a given, a default inclusion in the execution.
Creativity + Quality = Lasting Value
Quality without creativity or innovation loses out in the long run. Creativity without quality brings short-lived success.