…that are new to the individual, organisation, market, industry, or world…
Innovations need to be new/novel. But too often we’re caught up with misconceptions on how novel an innovation needs to be.
Old school thinking often suggests innovation needs to be something never seen before. But this is not the case. Cloud-based ERP is not “new to the world,” but for a mid-market manufacturer adopting it for the first time, it is innovation. If it enables better progress than their current approach.
ISO’s innovation standard gives us an entry point into thinking about novelty. Essentially saying it is up to those involved to determine how novel a proposed innovation is:
novelty is relative to, and determined by the perception of the organisations and interested parties
ISO 56000 (2025) – Innovation Management – Fundamentals and Vocabulary
I prefer a more quantitative definition.
Here’s Edison, bin Ali, and Torkar’s (2013) framing. Innovation can be new to the individual, firm, market, industry, or the world.
| new to… | definition |
|---|---|
| firm / individual | “The minimum level of novelty of innovation is that it must be new to firm. It is defined as the adoption of an idea, practice or behaviour whether a system, policy, program, device, process, product, technology or administrative practice that is new to the adopting organisation” I also add new to individual here, reflecting that the innovator could be a single Seeker. |
| market | “When the firm is the first to introduce the innovation to its market” |
| industry | “These innovations are new to the firm’s industry sector” |
| world | “These innovations imply a greater degree of novelty than new to the market and include innovations first introduced by the firm to all markets and industries, domestic and international” |
This view reflects how innovations may start off as new to the world but diffuse outwards becoming less novel.
CRISPR gene editing and the first quantum computers were new to the world. They offer entirely new progress that wasn’t possible before. Genetic diseases can be cured with CRISPR, and complex logistics challenges readily solved with annealing quantum computers. Other quantum computing devices are further away.
As with most breakthroughs, they will evolve into new to market or industry innovations as adoption widens and applications diversify. For example, a logistics company might begin leveraging anealing quantum computing to solve complex, dynamic route optimisation challenges in regions where planning was once static and manual. A new-to-industry innovation could be a construction firm adopting digital twins for project monitoring. That’s a practice originally developed within aerospace engineering.
At the new-to-firm level, a mid-sized hospital could deploy robotic process automation to streamline its billing process. They are applying a proven solution already in use across other healthcare settings.
One reason I like this definition is that it suggests sources of innovation. What are other firms, industries and markets doing that you can take advantage of? And, that seekers expect to do things with you they can in other markets/industries.
Carrying innovation from one market/industry to another
I want to pick back up on the point made early about sources of innovation. One way innovations move from one market/industry to another is when they are “carried” by a particular actor.
Den Hertog identified in Knowledge-Intensive Business Services As Co-Producers Of Innovation this often happens when consultants are active. They typically work in a wide range of industries and markets getting exposed to a wide range of ideas. We could expect they carry ideas from market to market and industry to industry. Are consultants you already engage included in your innovation activities?
There are many B2B examples of this carrying. Predictive maintenance, for instance, first proved itself in aerospace, where uptime and safety are paramount. It was then carried into manufacturing, logistics, and even energy infrastructure to reduce downtime and extend asset life. Agile development methods blossomed in software engineering and have been carried into hardware design, marketing, and even strategy development as organisations recognised their power to respond faster to changing Seeker needs.
Seekers can create a demand for innovations to be carried. They are involved in many progress attempts across many industries (and in a global economy, many markets). In those attempts they get exposed to innovations, and if beneficial, start expecting to see them in your market/industry.
The humble QR code is a good example of a blend of these factors. Born in manufacturing for tracking parts, it was carried into other industries/markets in the company to company way. Once the public got exposed to it, it flourished in retail, payments, transport, entertainment, and even healthcare.
Relation to Adopter types
I mentioned how innovations diffuse becoming less novel over time. It is tempting to map these shifting levels of novelty directly onto Rogers’ classic adopter types: innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards.
Those categories are valuable. They offer deep insight into the psychology of adoption, the forms of marketing likely to resonate, and the conditions that accelerate uptake. In the progress economy, these dynamics surface as one of the six progress hurdles: adoptability.
But mapping adopter types directly to novelty is misleading. An innovation that is well established in one market, let’s say is being adopted by the late majority, may still be highly challenging to adopt in a different market/industry. It may once again require innovators and early adopters to lead the way.
Innovation diffusion is a fascinating topic, I have more about it over here.
Let’s progress together through discussion…