Where Did Innovation Come From?

Paradoxically, although innovation expresses novelty, it is a very old concept. Its history dates back to Ancient Greece. It is claimed that it was first used by Xenophon in 400 BC. Then we see it in the texts of Plato and Aristotle. In the 3rd and 4th centuries, the word "novitas" used in Rome meant renewing. In the following centuries, the word changed to "innova" (I renew). In the 1500s, Machiavelli attributed a political meaning to innovation. He used it to express changes in the form of government, including new laws and new institutions. Machiavelli's innovation contained a positive meaning. However, in the historical process, innovation constantly underwent changes in meaning. For example, between the 15th and 16th centuries, innovation had negative connotations and was mostly used in the sense of rebellion. Rebels were called innovators. In the 1800s, capitalists regarded socialism, communism, cooperatives as social innovations and launched a serious counter-propaganda. In the 20th century, the concept of innovation was extremely outmoded. With the Industrial Revolution, innovation was associated with science and invention. With World War II, technology innovations began to be discussed. Once change was a negative situation, it evolved into a positive meaning. In modern times, it was the Austrian economist Schumpeter who dusted off innovation and brought it back to popularity. We owe largely to his theories what we understand by innovation today. He is the first person to study innovation and entrepreneurship in an academic and scientific sense. Today, there are hundreds of different definitions of innovation. There are extremely open-ended definitions such as change or novelty, as well as vague definitions such as ISO 56000's "new enterprise creating value". These types of definitions rightly bring with them the following questions: Is every novelty an innovation? How do we measure value? How do we know if an outcome is "value"? Of course, not every novelty is an innovation. You painted the walls of your house a new color. Or you switched to wallpaper instead of paint. The municipality built a new park in the neighborhood. These are not innovations. My preferred definition of innovation is: the transformation of a creative idea or invention into a new product, process, or business model that creates value. Here, we measure value by the customer's interest in the new product in question. If they pay money and buy it, it means it has created value. Therefore, at the end of the day, innovation is a new product or service that generates income (including business models and other types of innovation). The economic and commercial meaning of innovation has been achieved through Schumpeter's work. It has also been good, thanks to which it has differed from similar concepts. Innovation is different from concepts such as R&D, invention, creativity, discovery. We should not create more confusion as some friends have seriously emptied the concept for the sake of popularity. Despite those who approach the subject only as an ordinary concept and a new technology, far from the technical aspects, and only because it is a "trend topic", innovation today is a discipline with a serious literature that many different fields of science and experts, from macroeconomists to industrial psychologists, work at different scales (level). Innovation has become a large field where thousands of articles and books are written, studied specifically for count…