On a recent visit to a boutique bath shop, one of us became so overwhelmed by the intensity of the scent circulating through the store that he was forced to flee within seconds.

Doug Rauch, the former president of Trader Joe's, visited my Service Operations class at MIT last week. When he mentioned that Trader Joe's invests in its employees a lot more than its competitors do, he was challenged by one of my students: "Isn't it a bad idea to invest in employees in settings like yours where shopping is transactional and can easily be done online?"

Last week, Target did the once unthinkable. In addition to matching prices of local brick and mortar stores, it announced this holiday season it would also match prices of any product sold by major Internet retailers including Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Walmart.com, and Toysrus.com.

Schumpeter's vision of the lone entrepreneur is so entrenched in our minds that we unconsciously tend to believe that entrepreneurial flair is a matter of genetics; a recent ECSI survey I conducted found that 68% of business leaders firmly believe that great innovators are born and cannot be made.

My colleague Chris Trimble and I have polled hundreds of managers, asking them to define innovation. Usually, managers equate innovation with creativity. But innovation is not creativity. Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business.

Creativity is under threat. It happens whenever and wherever there's a squeeze on the ingredients of creativity, and it's happening in many businesses today. According to the Labor Department's most recent stats, productivity is up.

Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad's 1989 HBR article "Strategic Intent" brought about a discontinuous shift in my career — from a professor of accounting to a researcher on strategy and innovation.

In the creative economy, innovation is more important than ever. Innovation is the only insurance against irrelevance.

When you're getting something new going, the difference between success and failure is often a matter of time: how long you give it before you give up.