Yeah I’d argue that creativity starts after the idea, when you roll your sleeves up and see it through to completion. Ideas are easy. Everyone has them. Doing the work by using your skills and tools is the actual creative process. Everything else is mindless ideation.
Or to put it another way, imagine a high-level executive telling the art department to come up with something cool for the next product line. He fires an email off, waits for the result, maybe sends a couple notes back. When he unveils the product, he says “look how creative and artistic I am.” Is he? I’d argue he isn’t. He just had the idea. Other people executed that idea. The best you can say about him is he guided the process along, but nobody in the art department needs him to be there.
100%