Towards a multidisciplinary definition of innovation

Purpose This paper aims to undertake a content analysis of extant definitions of “innovation” as a basis for proposing an integrative definition of organizational “innovation”. Design/methodology/approach A literature review was used to generate a representative pool of definitions of organizational innovation, including definitions from the different disciplinary literatures of economics, innovation and entrepreneurship, business and management, and technology, science and engineering. A content analysis of these definitions was conducted in order to surface the key attributes mentioned in the definitions, and to profile the descriptors used in relation to each attribute. Findings The key attributes in the…