Innovative? Creative? Visionary?

I like to think I'm a creative guy: full of ideas, thinking of new things to do and new ways to do things. Heck, I'm even a songwriter and musician. But, as I think more about it, I wonder: Is there's a difference to being creative and being innovative? Or a visionary? And can you be one without being the other? Or is one better than the other or are they just different shades of the same color? I mean, if I write a song — one no ones ever heard before and that sounds like nothing else ever heard — is that innovative or creative? Or am I visionary?

Brigham Young University professor Jeff Dyer and others have been doing research (read more here and here) to understand just what makes the innovators different. Or, more correctly, what do they do different and what can we do to be more innovative in the same game-changing, big idea way. In the article and interview, the words I asked about above show up: creative, visionary, innovator as well as other words that I'd like to associate with myself. But there are also many more practical and pragmatic words used to describe people like Jeff Bezos, AG Lafley, Meg Whitman and Michael Dell (granted, these guys aren't Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso or Elvis Costello, all people I'd call creative, innovative and visionary in an instant). Words like: associating, study, challenge, questioning, observing, experiment, persistence and networking. They also assert that two-thirds of a person's ability to innovate is learned and the other one-third is tied to how the person is hard-wired.

So in my non-academic way of looking at things, I think that I'll choose to agree with one of my questions above: I think that innovative, creative and visionary are different shades of the same color. I'll go a little further and add that I think that you can't be one of these things without being the others and that perhaps it's a chosen vocation or the way these traits are acquired that defines the label: artists are creative, academics are visionary, business people are innovative (although I don't typically like labels and I'm not applying them here).

And I take encouragement in the fact that you can work at these things to become better at them or develop them further. Speaking from my experience as a songwriter, I know that my song writing can become less creative if I am not seeking to be innovative and I am less fulfilled in both process and outcome if I am not making an effort to be visionary in crafting something that hasn't been done before.