John Wolpert had a great comments in response to my post entitled, The Process of Innovation. John writes about innovation affecting change...

I was reading the definitions on innovation and was curious about your perspective on project managers making good innovators.

I mention in the post my simple definition...

putting ideas to action... and that action making a difference.

John continued...

From my perspective, innovation is not about putting an idea into action per se - that is execution (and no doubt good project managers are all about execution). For me, a more rigorous definition of innovation is the use of new tools (or previously existing tools used in a new way) to change how the world works, how people organize themselves, and how they conduct their lives.

From this definition, there are just innovators using or making inventions that change the economics - the rules - of living and working. It distinguishes between improvement (which may make an existing way of living more efficient) and invention (which is merely the tool sitting on the shop floor until an innovator uses it to break out of a box).

The definition also allows, as it should, for both positive and negative innovators. Innovation should be analyzed without value judgments. In my experience, nearly all innovations have had both bad and good outcomes from different points of view. A rule of thumb I use: "If someone didn't lose his job and another person didn't get a new one, it probably wasn't innovation." It might have been something else equally (or more) valuable, but it wasn't innovation.

There is a lot of confusion out there about this word, innovation. I believe it is because it is so closely associated in the mind with notions of improvement, novelty, inventiveness. We need a way to rigorously distinguish when something is innovation and not these other things.

Great discussion, John. I think the philosophy of innovation is in the "Interrogative Era" (the "who, what, where, when, how and why" stage)... we haven't agreed upon the language of innovation, which makes it difficult for us to speak about it without confusion.