innovation

UK/ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/US/ˌɪn.əˈveɪ.ʃən/

nounB2+Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #9,685 of 15,258mostly written

Other forms: innovations

An innovation is a new method or product, or the making of one. A useful innovation.

It is different from an invention, since an innovation is the thing put to use. Most innovation is a small improvement repeated rather than any single leap.

Definitions of innovation

1nouninnovationA new method or product, or the making of one.B2+
“The one innovation that mattered was letting people pay afterwards.”

innovation is a novelty.

Where it comes from

Latin innovatio comes from innovare, to renew, from in plus novus, new.

Latin
innovatio
Old French
innovacion
Middle French
innovation
English, today
innovation

Middle French innovation, from Old French innovacion, from Latin innovatio, from Latin innovo. Morphologically innovate + -ion.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

innovation in the wild

In theory, disruptive innovation makes it hard for leading firms to stay at the top of their industry.
Disruptive innovation
Not all innovations are disruptive, even if they are revolutionary.
Disruptive innovation
Technical innovation often manifests itself through the engineering process when the problem being solved is of a technical or scientific nature.
Innovation
Many technology-intensive organizations exploit technological innovation in a rapidly changing consumer market.
New product development
Rogers proposes that five main elements influence the spread of a new idea: the innovation itself, adopters, communication channels, time, and a social system.
Diffusion of innovations

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

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