Creativity is the ability to imagine or invent something new. Creativity is not the ability to create out of nothing, but the ability to generate new ideas by combining, changing, or reapplying existing ideas.

Finding solutions to problems, and designing solutions to problems. In a sense any design task is also a problem-solving task because there is something to be achieved and no obvious way of achieving it.

Those connections are found by either reproductive thinking, looking for improvements, or productive thinking, looking for something new or a new insight. Incremental improvement is good but no level of improvement or efficiency gain will produce something fundamentally new.