Creativity: Invention vs. Imitation

Creativity is replicating the elegance of a spider web in a synthetic technology.
Creativity is transposing the structural nature of burrs – flowering plants peppered with little hooks for protection during seed dispersion – in the design of Velcros. Nature, in divulging its secrets, has upreared a metanoia of character and has assumed the spectator for man as the latter takes control of the stage and enacts the melodrama of creation.

In short creativity can come in the form of imitation – stealing and copying the blueprints of natural evolution to further the human cause.

On the other hand, creativity also expresses itself in the method of invention – beginning on a white slate and starting from scratch. The science of mathematics and the mathematics of science are examples of this creative method. Being purebred products of the human mind – of detached ingenuity – man has fashioned a formidable harvest with nothing save his internal understanding and has reaped what he has sown in aiding the developmental progression of those ideas.

Now, the question I poise is, simply put, whether invention or imitation is more conducive to the generation and actualization of creativity? If the ends justify the means, should man play the role of emulator or lead way in a new direction?

I learned about it in my high school psychology class.
(The next part comes from Cognitive Psychology, the one that studies mental processes)
Imagination comes in two flavors:
>One recreates memories (it has a name, but i don’t remember it, _)
>The other is creativity , it works taking parts of ideas to make something new.
Its very hard to make something 100% new , for example, fiction has some patters:
Someone does good things (hero),
Someone does bad things (villain)
Mr. Villain’s activities generates conflict with Mr. Hero’s ideals/life.
There, a large chunk of humanity’s stories (fiction and non-fiction) in a comfy description. The joke is that you need to give the story some spice, a new combination of ideas.
This is mostly something that you should find in a literature class or TvTropes.

Math would be impossible without basic things such as multiplications and divisions (e.g. Pythagoras’ theorem depends on multiplication and sums)