Innovation Management Glossary

A firm's ability to recognize, assimilate, and apply new external knowledge for commercial purposes.

An organization's ability to simultaneously pursue exploitation of existing capabilities and exploration of new opportunities.

A strategic approach focused on creating uncontested market space rather than competing in existing saturated markets.

Fundamental changes to how a company creates, delivers, and captures value, distinct from product or process innovation.

Strategic investment by established companies in external startups or the creation of internal entrepreneurial ventures.

Schumpeter's concept that innovation continually destroys old economic structures while creating new ones.

A human-centered iterative approach to innovation emphasizing empathy, ideation, prototyping, and testing.

Everett Rogers's theory explaining how new ideas and technologies spread through populations over time across adopter categories.

An innovation that creates a new market by targeting non-consumers or the low end, eventually displacing established competitors.

The strategic tension between searching for new knowledge and opportunities (exploration) versus refining and using existing ones (exploitation).

Small, continuous improvements to existing products, services, or processes that enhance performance or reduce cost.

A network of organizations, institutions, and individuals that interact to enable and support innovation activities.

A model depicting how many initial ideas are progressively filtered and refined until a few reach commercialization.

Legal rights protecting creations of the mind, including patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets.

Entrepreneurial activity undertaken by employees within an established organization to develop new products or ventures.

Eric Ries's methodology emphasizing rapid experimentation, validated learning, and iterative development through build-measure-learn cycles.

The simplest version of a product that enables a team to collect the maximum validated learning about customers.

A paradigm where firms use external and internal ideas and paths to market to advance innovation.

A fundamental change in business strategy or product direction based on validated learning from customers.

Innovation that introduces fundamentally new products, technologies, or concepts that can create new markets or transform existing industries.

A pattern showing that technology performance improves slowly at first, accelerates, then plateaus as limits are reached.

A structured innovation framework dividing projects into stages separated by managerial decision gates.

Improvements along dimensions mainstream customers value, typically pursued by incumbent firms.

A 9-point scale measuring the maturity of a technology from basic research to operational deployment.

Simultaneously pursuing differentiation and low cost to create a leap in value for both the company and its customers.