Innovation Definition: What Counts as Something New

The meaning of innovation, step by step

However experts define innovation, most versions share three parts:

1. Something new. New to the world, or at least new to the place where it is used. A school that starts using a teaching method common elsewhere is still innovating for itself.
2. Put into use. It is built, tried, sold or adopted. An idea that never leaves the meeting room does not count yet.
3. Adds value. It solves a problem, saves time or money, or improves something for the people who use it.

As an uncountable noun, innovation means the process or habit: The industry needs more innovation. As a countable noun, it means one new thing: The folding stretcher was a useful innovation.

Innovation versus invention

People often treat the two as the same, but they are different stages.

Many innovations involve no invention at all. A bus company that lets riders pay with a phone instead of cash uses existing technology in a new way; that is innovation without a new invention.

Main types of innovation

• Product innovation: a new or much improved good or service.
• Process innovation: a better way of making or delivering something, such as a faster assembly line or a simpler hospital check-in.
• Business model innovation: a new way of earning money, for example renting instead of selling.
• Social innovation: new solutions to community problems, such as a neighborhood tool library.
• Incremental innovation: small, steady improvements to what already exists.
• Radical or disruptive innovation: a big shift that changes how a whole market or habit works, sometimes pushing older products aside.

Two neighbors of this word, entrepreneur and enterprise, are covered in the business and money hub.

Innovation definition in sentences

• The farmers' group praised the innovation of drip irrigation, which cut their water use in half.
• Our principal wants more innovation in how homework is set and checked.
• Self-checkout lanes were an innovation that some shoppers loved and others avoided.
• Small firms often innovate faster because they have fewer layers of approval.
• The award goes to the most innovative student project of the year.

Using innovate, innovative and innovator

Innovate is the verb. It can stand alone (companies that fail to innovate) or take in or on (innovate in design, innovate on an old recipe). Innovative describes a person, idea or product that is new and creative. An innovator is the person or group bringing the change.

A common slip is writing inovation with one n. The word has two: in + novation. Another is overusing the word. If every small update is called an innovation, the word loses meaning, so careful writers save it for changes that are new and actually used.

From renewal to progress

Innovation reached English in the middle of the 1400s, borrowed from Late Latin innovatio, from innovare, to renew or change, built on novus, new. Its first English sense was restoration or renewal. By the 1540s it meant a new change brought into an established way of doing things.

Historians point out that for a long time this was not always praise. In matters of religion and government, calling something an innovation could be a warning that someone was meddling with tradition. The strongly positive feel the word has today, linked to technology, growth and progress, is much more recent.

Innovation meaning in English across settings

In business, innovation is tied to growth and competition. In government, it turns up in phrases such as innovation policy or innovation hubs. In schools and universities, it describes new teaching tools or research that reaches the public. In daily chat it can be light and simple: a new way to fold laundry might earn the label from a proud family member.

Linked ideas are explained on our pages for catalyst, paradigm and algorithm.