An Innovation Vocabulary

Gordon Graham is creating a list of innovation-related terms that companies should know and understand, including sustained innovation, disruptive innovation and radical innovation. Gordon asks for help creating a list of terms for this common vocabulary project.

I’ll suggest the addition of invention and innovative, although the latter should come easily from the definition of innovation. I'm throwing the term invention in because an article in Business Week states that, "In the West, we still confuse invention with innovation." The article also defines innovation as "the ability to create and capture economic value from invention." I think that something can be innovative without being economically successful, although many definitions of innovation out there disagree with this view.

Anyway, back to the list. In order to find more terms for Gordon's list, I cheated and looked up innovation on Wikipedia where are listed several different types of innovation. So, I suggest that these be added to the list as well: product innovation, process innovation, marketing innovation, organizational innovation and business model innovation.

Complementary to these, an article in the Serious Innovation Newsletter titled Innovation Strategy—what the hell is it?  lists four terms for inclusion as well. They are types of innovation strategies that have been identified by Richard Wittington of the Oxford Business School: the Classicist strategy, the Evolutionist strategy, the Processualist strategy, and the Systematic strategy. These may appear to be similar to the Wikipedia terms because of their similar names (process innovation, processualist strategy), but they have quite different applications. These terms define different approaches to creating innovation while the Wikipedia terms define different types of innovation. Thus, you could have a systematic approach to process innovation and a processualist approach to system innovation.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I came across a quote in one of their definitions of the term innovation that I like because it resonates with a previous post of mine. In that post, I talked about the requirement that something must be novel and nonobvious if it is to be an innovation, and I related this to the requirement of novelty and nonobviousness for patents. Wikipedia’s entry on innovation has the following quote that is consistent with this concept:

All innovation begins with creative ideas…creativity by individuals and teams is a starting point for innovation; the first is necessary but not sufficient condition for the second. (Amabile, 1996)

Send Gordon a comment if you have any further suggestions for his list.

Comments

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Hi,

I just came over your blog. Quite interesting. Yes i do believe that new words trigger new thoughts. I have created some of them my self. (see my blog & website)

Ives

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