They go hand in hand I think. Imagination helps create applications for any knowledge you might have and is essential for any level of innovation.
I agree. You can be the smartest person in the world, but if you dont have a creative mind you will never create anything new or solve any problems.
Every day I deal with people who are college educated and/or professionals in some field. I get really frustrated when they cant see something for what it can be, not for what it is. It takes imagination to visualize what a completed project will look like, withing imagining what you are trying to achieve, then you can't achieve it.
Right now I am the sole driving force of trying to get my son's high school additional funding. Kohl's is giving away a half million bucks each to the top 20 schools that get votes on the facebook Kohl's Cares program. The people that I am trying to motivate to vote frequently say "there is no point, we cant win anyway". All they see is that the odds of us winning are slim (there are 66,500 schools competing for the top 20 spots). They ask me how many votes the top vote getters already have, I tell them 5,000, then they say "no way we can win". What they are not capable of is imagining how we can win. We have over 2,000 students, over half of them have facebook accounts, and many of the parents have facebook accounts. If we could just get the parents and students who are already on facebook to vote, we would get over 10,000 votes (they can vote 20 times, up to 5 votes per school). Then we started a voating coalition with 3 other large schools, if they do the same thing, and if we all vote for our school plus the 3 other coalition members, we could all have 40,000 votes. It would be mighty tough for the current leaders to go from their current 5,000 votes to 40,000 votes (most of the current leaders are year round schools, our school hasnt even started yet).
It takes imagination to achieve anything new.