creativity vs innovation

To me, creativity and innovation are two separate words with two different meanings, although they both can be intertwined to help each other out. I feel that creativity is making the most out of a given situation. You can be creative in a lot of different ways, it doesn't just have to be artistic endeavors. I'm a broke college student, and I have to be creative every night when it comes to how I am going to eat dinner. Pasta is cheap and I stock up whenever I go to the grocery store, so I wind up eating it a lot. The issue is it gets boring the same spaghetti with tomato sauce, so I have to get creative. I look in my fridge and cabinets and look to see what I can do, I see I have basil, and garlic, and some cashews, so there it is my creative thought comes into my head, Ill just make some pesto sauce that way I wont be so bored with what I normally put on my pasta. Although its not very creative, it is at least a little bit, but in no ways was it innovative, everyone can make pesto.

In my mind, innovation isnt more important than creativity, its just on a different plane of thinking. When I think of innovation, I think of something that has never been done before, something that steps up the level of play and makes others think "Wow, I wish I thought of that". However, I do believe that no one can be innovative without being creative. This is where the two go hand in hand and make each other work. For example, maybe Alexander Graham Bell was just really lonely when he came up with the idea to make the telephone. Although probably not true, it illustrates the point that he had to be creative to figure out an easy way to talk to people across long distances without moving from your house, and in his creativity, he created a hugley innovative idea, to build a telephone.