Paper 13
A Cognitive-Linguistic Investigation of the Concept and Skill of Innovation
Lourenço MD Amador, University of Melbourne
Abstract
Innovation has been essential to human progress and the development of the 21st Century world. Thus it has become a major buzzword in modern times, both in our daily lives and in research. It started gaining momentum as a topic of research outside of economics and management in the 1970s, leading to the emerging field of “Innovation Studies”. However, despite this popularity, interdisciplinary conceptualizations and models of innovation and its skills have not been properly investigated. Furthermore, the relationship with other related concepts (e.g. creativity) has also not been clearly mapped out. Therefore, this research sought to address these gaps via answering two main questions: “What is innovation?” and “Is innovation a skill?”. The approaches used were multidisciplinary literature reviews, to understand how different perspectives conceptualize innovation and its skill; a Prototype Analysis, to investigate the layperson’s conceptualization of innovation, a perspective lacking from the literature; and a pilot study with a methodology inspired by grounded theory, to investigate and produce expert-filtered definitions and models of innovation and the skill of innovation. From these theoretical and experimental approaches, the definitions of innovation and its skills, developed from these findings are:
Innovation is a creation or alteration of a tool or knowledge, which has significant influence on its relevant domain(s) or system(s), by one or more agents, either intentionally or attentionally. It can be discovered through luck, exploration or iterative development. The agent involved with innovation is visionary and capable of high-level ideation and knowledge implementation towards solving difficult problems.
Details
- Session: Paper session 21
- Scheduled: Thursday 11th, 10:30 – 12:00
- Room: 2S3
