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Introduction
Because entrepreneurship occupies such a central role in the modern economy, the phenomenon has received sustained and significant attention in recent scholarly literature. The constituent elements of entrepreneurship, as well as the conditions for fostering and sustaining it, are of particular salience for both theoretical understanding and practical application. Creativity and innovation are terms that have had a longstanding connection with entrepreneurship, although the heuristic use of such concepts varies greatly.
In some works, creativity is associated with individual action while innovation occurs at the level of the firm or institution. Oftentimes a bottom-up causality is assumed: creative activity by the individual, when occurring within appropriate circumstances and conditions, can lead to innovative firms (Ahlin et al., 2014; An et al., 2017). In other discussions, creativity is understood to be a broader cultural or sociological phenomenon, while innovation has a particularly economic or commercial element. Innovation can thus be understood as creative activity in the economic sphere. Still other usages distinguish between theory and practice, with creativity referring to the discovery or development of ideas, while innovation refers to the application of those ideas (Galbraith, 1982; Majaro, 1988, p. 27; Amabile et al., 1996; Yusuf, 2007), particularly within a market setting (Antonites and van Vuuren, 2005, p. 257). A complementary understanding is of creativity or creative industries as subsets of or distinct from other productive enterprises (Taylor, 2011). Emmett (2019) highlights the development of the idea of the entrepreneur, particularly in religious literature, as well as providing a helpful framework for understanding a “theology of entrepreneurship.”
Our argument is that creativity and innovation can be properly understood to differ from the perspective of their relationship to history. That is, creativity can be distinguished from innovation in terms of the radical novelty of a particular discovery or invention vs with respect to what has already happened in history. Creativity can be understood as what human beings do in connection with the fundamental given-ness, or ontology, of things. From some religious perspectives, for example, creativity is a human virtue or faculty that is made possible by the metaphysically prior reality of divine creation and the structure of the human person in connection with that reality. Innovation, on the other hand, can be best...