The Strategy Design

What is innovation?

Definition

Innovation can be defined as the development or adoption of new concepts or ideas, and/or the new or adopted ideas themselves as well as the successful exploitation of new ideas. Creativity is having the ideas, and innovation is its application. Creativity only emerges when the innovator takes the idea and does something with it. Successful exploitation of new ideas can lead to any form of increased organizational or social benefit.
Joseph Schumpeter defined economic innovation in "Theorie der Wirtschaftlichen Entwicklung" (1912):

1. The introduction of a new good — that is one with which consumers are not yet familiar — or of a new quality of a good.
2. The introduction of an improved or better method of production, which need by no means be founded upon a discovery scientifically new, and can also exist in a better way of handling a commodity commercially.
3. The opening of a new market that is a market into which the particular branch of manufacture of the country in question has not previously entered, whether or not this market has existed before.
4. The conquest of a new source of supply of raw materials or half-manufactured goods, again irrespective of whether this source already exists or whether it has first to be created.
5. The carrying out of the better organization of any industry, like the creation of a monopoly position or the breaking up of a monopoly position.

Under the LEADER+ Community Initiative in 2000-06, innovation was defined by the Commission Notice and LAGs were allowed in principle to support:

• the emergence of new products and services which incorporate the distinctiveness of the local area,
• new methods permitting the combination of the area's human, natural and/or financial resources, resulting in better use of indigenous potential,
• the combination of and links between economic sectors which are traditionally separate,
• original forms of organisation and involvement of the local population in the decision-making process and in implementing the project.

The LEADER Sub-committee Focus Group 2 on Innovation established in 2009under ENRD found that during the current programming period the flexibility of the regulatory framework (no strict definition of innovation) allows each LAG to define innovation in its own context .