Defining Novelty and Innovation

Is novelty essential for innovation?

Novelty is an important notion in an innovation context – it is a desired quality of business ideas, services, products, and features. Truly novel ideas that are proven and have practical potential enrich the state of the art; they create opportunities for Intellectual Property - patents - and differentiators for products and companies.

However, novelty depends on the point of view, and it is not binary – it needs to be expressed using a degree, a level of newness. In practice, there needs to be a scale reflecting ‘how novel’ the solution is to the market or industry. Very often, real-world solutions encapsulate multiple ideas some of which may be known, others not. The degree of newness reflects how many of those essential features are, indeed, novel.

The estimation of the ‘level of novelty’ should also reflect the maturity of the public knowledge in relevance to the under-consideration solution. in one case, the solution being evaluated for its novelty may be known but only at a conceptual level; in another case, it may be fully implemented and widely adopted. The following presents novelty from various standpoints to help develop a basic assessment system for evaluating a proposed solution in terms of novelty.

1. New to the world

This level means that the solution under consideration is seen for the first time: there are no implementations, references, patents, technical or scientific literature describing the core components of the solution, and there is no evidence in the public domain that such a solution existed before.

When such type of novelty is identified, it should trigger the patent assessment process to examine further if the solution qualifies for a patent or if it needs to be kept as a trade secret. In such cases, as novelty is essential for the patentability of an invention, there is a defined process to assess it – the prior art search, which analyzes the invention against patent databases and public domain literature to create a view on the level of novelty of the ‘invention’.

This is typically applied before the submission of the patent application, and it is run by specialized patent professionals. If there is a limited novelty of the idea, it may be a blocker for the patent process. For example, if prior art is found, the invention is considered to be known and thus not patentable.

But in a broader innovation context, novelty becomes fuzzier and is open to interpretation.

Check also: our unique Innovation Toolkit - a collection of innovation templates that empower teams to frame problems, shape ideas, run hackathons, and more.

2. New to the industry or market

At this level, the solution under consideration is based on a core idea that is known to the world, but it is new to the industry being applied. Usually, this happens when a specific technology or concept is used in an industry that it was not originally developed for.

In a hypothetical example, a car manufacturer applies for the first time in the automotive industry a gesture control technology to improve the driver’s experience. In this case, the gesture recognition system – the sensors, the algorithms, the software – may be coming directly out of the gaming industry, originally designed and developed to enhance in-game experiences. In this hypothetical example, although the technology is known, it is its application in the automotive industry that is new – it has never been applied as a system that helps drivers interact with the car.

In such cases, novelty needs to be examined in the right context: if the application of a known idea to another sector is non-obvious and has never been seen before – then this should qualify as a ‘dose of novelty’ for the solution – it may be considered somehow novel.

3. New to the company

This level refers to novelty within the boundaries of the company. It is about ideas and solutions that are perceived as novel in comparison, not to the state-of-the-art, but to what is known and used within the boundaries of the organization itself.

This usually happens when the company independently re-discovers a solution, or when intentionally decides to apply existing knowledge and ideas coming from the market.

For instance, a company may be restructuring and redesigning its processes by leveraging some of the latest technologies towards optimization, automation, and other efficiencies. These ideas and concepts may be new when considered within the existing knowledge and implementations of the organization, but are well-known in the outside world.

Although there is nothing new literally, some level of novelty within the boundaries of the organization may be acknowledged.  

4. New to the product

This is a special case of ‘novelty’ since both the world and the company know about the ideas, the solutions, and the technologies being introduced. The novelty at this level is examined within the boundaries of a specific product.

For example, a company may be investing heavily in redesigning an established product they own, in order to catch up with the competition. The team brings into the product the latest technologies in Artificial Intelligence to offer improved user experiences. They use open-source software along with knowledge and resources from open innovation initiatives.

Although the team is not producing anything novel, the efforts lead to a significantly improved product - more effective, appealing, and well-received from customers. Compared to the history of the product, this may look like a significant innovation since it is the first time it uses machine learning to adapt and better perform certain tasks.

But, as the company is only reusing publicly available knowledge, does this qualify as product innovation? The answer is positive but to a limited degree, as the company in this example is doing new things only within the boundaries of the product – and competitors may already offer similar applications in the market. This is a case of limited, sustainable product innovation.

Cover photo by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay