Innovation is...

As the births of living creatures at first are ill shaped, so are all innovations, which are the births of time. Surely every medicine is an innovation and he that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils, for time is the greatest innovator.
Francis Bacon

Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things,
Theodore Levitt

Innovation is the process of turning ideas into manufacturable and marketable form.
Watts Humphrey

Innovation grows out of membership and a sure sense of responsibility people feel for their work and the organizations that employ them.
Abraham Zaleznick

The innovation point is the pivotal moment when talented and motivated people seek the opportunity to act on their ideas and dreams.
W. Arthur Porter

Innovation is the process of implementing new ideas, of turning creative concepts into realities. For our purposes, there is a more meaningful concept, that of "effective innovation," which can benefit business. Effective innovation is the timely and efficient implementation of new ideas that result in significantly increased revenues and profits.
George Freedman

Innovation is the specific tool of entrepreneurs, the means by which they exploit change as an opportunity for a different business or a different service. It is capable of being presented as a discipline, capable of being learned, capable of being practiced. Entrepreneurs need to search purposefully for the sources of innovation, the changes and their symptoms that indicate opportunities for successful innovation. And they need to know and to apply the principles of successful innovation,
Peter Drucker

To most observers, innovation is a solitary process that requires creativity and genius, perhaps even greatness. It can't, in their view, be managed or predicted, just hoped for and, perhaps, facilitated. But for me innovation was and still is more than that. It was a battle in the marketplace between innovators or attackers trying to make money by changing the order of things, and defenders protecting their cash flow.
Richard Foster

The industrial landscape is already littered with remains of once successful companies that could not adapt their strategic vision to altered conditions of competition.
Abernathy, Clark & Kantrow

To meet the demands of the fast changing competitive scene, we must simply learn to love change as much as we have hated it in the past.
Tom Peters

Business has only two basic functions: Marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.
Peter Drucker

Systematic Innovation consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation
Peter Drucker

Innovation endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth or creates a resource. Innovation is the procedure of implementing new ideas, of turning creative concepts into realities. Innovation can occur in all areas- Technical, Social, Political, Economic. Innovation in one area always affects the other areas. Innovation can cause change or exploit change. Systematic innovation which exploits change is generally the most effective.
Donna Prestwood & Paul Schumann