Adapted from a report by Lisa Hoashi, Mercy Corps Senior Internal Communications Officer.

Mohammed Gawdat.

Creativity means doing something new. Innovation means doing something differently.

Our world of scarcity needs both.

That's the argument mounted last week in Cairo, at Mercy Corps' bi-annual Global Leadership Gathering, by Mohammed Gawdat, Google's Vice President for Emerging Markets. The set of principles Gawdat laid out matter as much to social entrepreneurs and innovators as to more traditional ones.

Gawdat reviewed four types of innovation:

Product innovation, when someone improves an existing product. For example, Apple's iPod is a product innovation over the MP3 players that came before it.

Process innovation, when an existing process is improved to be more efficient. Toyota innovated when it began to use "lean manufacturing" to make cars.

Service innovation. With stores that feel like "home," Starbucks focuses on selling an experience, rather than just a product, coffee.

Business model innovation. This type of innovation focuses on improving the way that a product is delivered. Amazon.com's online store, which virtually sells everything, fundamentally changed the way that consumers shop and make purchases.

Everyone is born creative, Gawdat said, and has the ability to innovate. "Surprisingly, all you can really do to innovation is block it," he said. "Leadership just has to know how to get out of the way."

Google's nine rules of innovation

1. Start with a clear, simple vision. Gawdat's example was Google's: "To organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

2. Hire the best. Gawdat showed this clip from the movie Ratatouille, where a rat tries to prove that he knows enough about cooking to be accepted as a chef. "Just because he's a rat doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's doing," Gawdat said. The "best" employees are whoever are "the best at the mission," he said, regardless of who they are and what credentials they have.

3. Find ideas everywhere. When you come up against someone or an idea that you don't like or find odd, ask "Why?" You never know where it might lead you.

4. Share. "Sometimes the truth hurts," Gawdat acknowledged, "but it's important to share it." At Google, information is thought to be better shared than hidden. Projects in development are shared across the company, and anyone can comment on them.

5. Morph ideas, don't kill them. Don't make the mistake of letting an idea stop at step one: let it shift. Google developed three social networking platforms before arriving at Google+.

6. Speed matters. Fast is better than slow.

7. Data trumps hype. At Google, Gawdat said, "every claim is backed up by data." Solid data drives all decisions.

8. Users come first. (And second, and third, and fourth...) Focus on what the customer wants, and then put resources toward addressing that.

9. Give permission to innovate. At Google, employees are encouraged to use 20 percent of their work time on any project of their choosing that's approved by their manager. "If [a Google employee] says they want to use that time to make a better car, then that's O.K.," said Gawdat. "No one is allowed to say, 'That is not what we do.'"

In closing, Gawdat showed Apple's classic Think Different ad, which ends by saying that "the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

"At most organizations," said Gawdat, "it is the few crazy people that are the ones that drive it forward ... If people are passionate about something, then you should allow them to move forward."

Declaring Internet access a human right would dilute the rights that matter more, says Internet pioneer Vint Cerf. Photo: Veni Markovski (Wikimedia)

Get real: The Internet isn't a human right.

That's the message from a man often credited with inventing the Internet, Vint Cerf. Writing in The New York Times yesterday, Cerf, who now works for Google, argued that human rights are "things we as humans need in order to lead healthy, meaningful lives":

At one time if you didn’t have a horse it was hard to make a living. But the important right in that case was the right to make a living, not the right to a horse. Today, if I were granted a right to have a horse, I’m not sure where I would put it.

Today's Internet—publicly developed but privately owned and financed—is a key tool in toppling kleptocracies and enriching millions of poor farmers. So Cerf's position is provocative. But it's a reminder that those of us who believe in markets' power to help solve poverty shouldn't cling too tightly to any single "market-based solution."

That wouldn't be market-based at all.