Company culture - Key enabler for the successful use and application of innovation and design, as a company's shared values and behaviours will determine what is valued and what is acceptable.
Creativity - Underlying driver for design and innovation. After attributing creative ability to divine inspiration, serendipity, lateral thinking, cognitive process or personality, most people have now come to accept that everyone can be creative. However, how easy it is for people to be creative, and how radical the ideas they generate are will vary.
Customer focus - Innovation's chances of success are greatest if a customer need - latent or explicit - is addressed. Good designers tend to centre their work on the customer (see 'lead user' and 'latent consumer needs').
Design awareness - The degree to which people within an organisation are aware of the value of the contribution design can make. This tends to be driven by senior management attitude.
Design thinking - refers to the processes and approaches generally used by designers, primarily centred around four aspects: customer focus and intimacy, experimentation, prototyping and emotional connectedness.
Empathic design - Innovation is all about coming up with new offerings that are appreciated by their users. There is generally no shortage of ideas, but ideas that really make a difference are rare. Empathic design is one approach that goes beyond asking the customer what they want. It involves observation and the immersion of the designer in the customer's situation and daily activity (see 'latent consumer needs').
Entrepreneur - Generally associated with individuals who develop a new idea into a business; managers in large organisations often aim to encourage conditions that foster entrepreneurship (see 'intrapreneurship').
Idea generation - The conscious generation of ideas is often the starting point for an innovation journey. There are many techniques to support idea generation; the most well-known and most widely used one is brainstorming. Most companies do not see the generation of new ideas as a problem. The question tends to be how to generate quality ideas, and how to select which of these ideas are to be taken forward.
Innovation - The ability to gain commercial success from the development and implementation of novel ideas, product, processes and business concepts.
Innovation ambition - The degree to which managers in any one organisation seek to drive company performance through innovation, and what kind of innovation they are seeking to generate (see 'incremental innovation' and 'radical innovation').
Innovation climate - The conditions within an organisation that either support or hinder innovation. Key drivers of an organisation's innovation climate are clarity and pervasiveness of strategy and vision, the leadership style, the company's culture and the physical work environment.
Innovation journey - Organisations do not become more innovative over night. Becoming more innovative requires time and the taking of conscious actions aimed at improving an organisation's 'innovation climate' (see above, hence 'innovation journey').
Innovation performance - An organisation's ability to innovate and deliver value through such innovation.
Incremental innovation - Minor changes to products or services. Most extensions of product lines would fall into this category.
Intrapreneurship - The application of the principles of entrepreneurship within large organisations to improve 'innovation performance' (see above).
Latent consumer needs - Those needs we are not aware of, or cannot yet articulate.
Lead user - A person who is ahead of the broader public in terms of needs and openness to new products. Involving lead users in the idea generation phase can help with the generation of innovative ideas.
New Product Development (NPD) - It seems to have become fashionable to use the term 'innovation' for everything that a few years ago would have been called 'new product development'. However, NPD is only one aspect of innovation activity. 'Innovation process' is often incorrectly used interchangeably with 'new product development process'.
Prototyping - An essential tool for both innovation and design as it helps to visualise novel concepts that, by their nature, may be difficult to communicate otherwise.
Radical innovation - Something that is significantly different from anything that has existed before. While 'radical' is often understood in context, eg something can be radically innovative in the context of one company, but not necessarily in the wider industry, in the pure sense 'radical innovation' will only refer to something that is 'new to the world'. This is often also referred to as a 'step change'.
Teamwork - A fundamental cornerstone of the innovation process. The more radical an idea, the more important it becomes to bring all parties involved in the realisation of the idea together at the outset.