Innovation

I’ve been struggling for sometime to come up with a good definition of innovation.

Why does it matter? Only because the word innovation is being thrown about by all sorts of people just at the minute and very few of them have any clear idea as to what they mean upon the utterance.

Vaguely, they will mumble, it implies something new-ish and that is also of value to someone, or someones.

More definitely they will say that promoting it will lead to good economic outcomes by means that are somewhat mysterious.

And most assuredly the promotion of it necessarily implies a government grant or tax cut, a government paid job, or similar. Without such a blood sacrifice the spirits of innovation can’t be bribed into working their magic.

So I have decided, after much review, that innovation can be defined thus:

Any government funded activity that aims to create positive economic outcomes but rarely does, and that can be publicised as being an activity (n.b. not an outcome) that is either new-ish or mostly forgotten.