People like results. If you demonstrated good results in a creative fashion? Then they like creativity. If you did it conventionally? They like that too.
The problem with the "creative" way is you have to go through the process of eliminating all the bad ideas again, which the conventional approach has already done. But the ideas are the fun part.
Being creative means producing lots of bad ideas that nobody wants to deal with. Dragging unwilling participants through your creative process of throwing out all the bad ideas? That's your dirty work. That's housekeeping and laundry. The few good new ideas? Prove them, then bring in others. Unless somebody is paid to put up with your crap.
They laughed at Einstein, but the also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Most of the comments so far, this one included, evade one aspect of creativity in the sense of unconventional ideas. The risk associated with testing out a truely original hypothesis is often greater than we can actually comprehend even far into the experiment; but failure doesn't mean the hypothesis was incorrect. We often speak of an idea "before its time", etc., - sadly, in retrospect. These are the ideas we drown by not sharing the risk as a group, ideas that could spare us great amounts of everything from discomfort to pain.
The problem with the "creative" way is you have to go through the process of eliminating all the bad ideas again, which the conventional approach has already done. But the ideas are the fun part.
Being creative means producing lots of bad ideas that nobody wants to deal with. Dragging unwilling participants through your creative process of throwing out all the bad ideas? That's your dirty work. That's housekeeping and laundry. The few good new ideas? Prove them, then bring in others. Unless somebody is paid to put up with your crap.
They laughed at Einstein, but the also laughed at Bozo the Clown.