Innovation: a misunderstood (and misused) word

Innovation: noun 1 the action or process of innovating. 2 a new method, idea, product, etc. Compact Oxford English Dictionary

In the 21st century, for any civilized nation, creating wealth and disseminating it fairly amongst its citizens are legitimate aims. Innovation - the creative human endeavour that lead to the design, development and diffusion of new technologies, products, and consequently the construction and re-shaping of new production and social systems - is a very powerful but misunderstood (and often misused) concept. Whether you are a scientist, an entrepreneur or a person who is very much interested in understanding innovation, then this discussion will bring to your attention some important issues and questions.

Because innovation happens in a wide variety of contexts, there exists, therefore, a wide range of, sometimes overlapping and even contradictory, definitions. These diverse contexts pertain to the activity domains of a multitude of actors. The hats you could wear are of a scientist, an entrepreneur, a private investor, a corporate executive, and of university and government officials. Hence, the organisational context of scientific or technology and product development is relevant if you are a scientist in a university lab or corporate R&D facility; starting a business and investment if you are a start up entrepreneur and investor; corporate structures, processes and systems if you are an R&D director; economic development, international trade and policy making if you are a policy maker or trade adviser, or even wider social systems if you are a philosopher or sociologist.

As you can imagine, the number and variety of actors who interact within continuously evolving contexts across time have made the conception of innovation morph considerably over the last fifty years.

During the 1950s, innovation was considered as a discrete event resulting from knowledge developed by isolated inventors and isolated researchers. A common distinction often made was that of invention and innovation. Invention was considered the first occurrence of an idea for a new product or process, while innovation was seen as the first attempt to carry it out into practice.

Nowadays, further distinctions have not only emerged but are now used routinely in contemporary vocabulary. Within the boundaries of a particular firm, an R&D director would encounter and differentiate between technology, product and process innovation. An example of the former (technology) would be a new bioinformatics software tool developed by a team of technologists that help a group of scientists crunch and analyse already coded data about specific attributes of new molecules and micro-biological organisms such as cells or as tiny as DNA and mRNA. A product innovation could be a newly developed drug that, after years of experimentation and testing, has successfully passed human clinical trials and is now ready for commercialization. The introduction of new information processing tools, such as the above, often leads to process innovations, by streamlining and accelerating previously lengthy chain of activities, or through the introduction of new methods or principles of working, such as six-sigma and quality management, amongst many others.

A product and process innovation may be embedded within a new business model innovation. Business model innovations tend to radically break old ways of working within a whole industry or society. Examples of business model innovations are the collective of virtual transactions and activities enabled by new technological platforms and services provided by companies such as Amazon or ebay, just to mention two of the hundreds available.

For people who study innovation within larger societal systems, innovation would be regarded as the result of a process of interaction and exchange of knowledge between a large diversity of actors within a long chain of interdependences. Recent social network and cognitive theories of innovation give emphasis to social relationships and embedded human (tacit) knowledge. Knowledge-based innovation requires the convergence of many kinds of knowledge lodged in the heads of different categories of actors. From this perspective, the performance of innovators depends on the relations and cooperation between actors in the social system.

Feel free to add your own definition of innovation; what do you considered to be an innovation worth promoting?