It’s feasible to articulate innovation’s fundamentals

The force of fundamentals

A framework of fundamentals for any subject or discipline is associated with a force for learning.

When education psychologist and cognitive learning theorist, Jerome Bruner, introduced the conceptualization called “structures of the discipline,” he argued that:

• “The curriculum of a subject should be determined by the most fundamental understanding of the underlying principles that give structure to the subject”
• The discipline’s structures represent “a minimum requirement for using knowledge, for bringing it to bear on problems and events one encounters.”

Drawing on the example of Algebra, Bruner proposed that students who learned about Algebra’s underlying principles, or structures, would be able to recognize all Algebra problems as “variations on a small set of themes.” This perspective, he argued, would make Algebra much easier to learn and to use. 

Similarly, thought leader, Peter Drucker, described this type of explicating framework (“organizing principles”) as the basis for converting a skilled craft into a methodology or discipline by making it “broadly teachable,” as occurred in the past with the subject of Engineering, the method of “differential diagnosis” used by physicians, and the scientific method.

Innovation’s fundamentals

The wide-ranging work of innovation practitioners and other experts, spanning decades and even centuries, indicates that it’s feasible to establish Innovation’s “structures of the discipline” — the most fundamental understanding of the underlying principles that give structure to the subject of Innovation. In fact, the volume of work in recent decades has made fundamentals more visible.

To demonstrate feasibility, this website offers provisional structures, or “fundamentals,” which aim to capture what is constant, or unifying, across Innovation’s widely varied expression.

It’s important to note that the provisional fundamentals are just that:

• They’re not presented as optimal.


• They’re offered here simply to demonstrate feasibility of articulating innovation’s “structures of the discipline.” That feasibility seems important based on an associated opportunity for learning leverage, described at this site’s next page.


• Even the term, “Innovation,” is provisional. Its use here might be considered a stand-in for the combination of “innovation and entrepreneurship,” following from an initial synthesis of sources. For example, one source identified innovation as the knowledge base of entrepreneurship, and multiple sources associated both labels with the same fundamental function.

Innovation in relation to Science and Invention

Bruner also described that knowing a discipline’s structures “permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully.” 

When it comes to student learning, there is perhaps nothing more meaningful than understanding how Innovation and its practice relates to Science and to Invention.

For example, based on the provisional set of Innovation’s fundamentals:

All three methodologies create change in the world.
Although each methodology creates a different type of change, the changes are sometimes closely related. In particular, certain examples of Innovation apply an advance, or change, from Science or Invention.

All three methodologies — Innovation, Science, and Invention — engage the same essential creative structure of hypotheses, or new connections of existing knowledge.
The imagination involved in making these new connections is described as “the ability to see possible new connections before one is able to prove them in any way.”
An idea may seem as if it comes from “nowhere,” but in fact it comes from your brain making a purposeful new connection from your existing knowledge.

Each methodology’s hypotheses correspond to the type of change to be produced. It’s the type of change, or purpose, that determines:

• the fundamental nature of hypotheses that fit into the methodology
• the types of existing knowledge that are most pertinent to each methodology’s hypotheses
• who comes up with the hypotheses
• how hypotheses lead to the methodology’s type of change
• and so on.

At this page: See provisional fundamentals for Innovation

• Wide-angle view: In the table just below, provisional fundamentals for Innovation are presented in relation to the equivalent for Science/Research and Invention. This wide angle view begins with the type of change that each practice, or methodology, produces.


• Zooming in on Innovation: Beneath the comparative table, at this page, see:
  • Brief discussion of the table’s entries for Innovation
  • Link to a document that provides a narrative synthesis of sources, which led to the table’s entries for Innovation, as a form of provisional fundamentals.
  • Link to overall Bibliography listing sources related to, both, the provisional framework of fundamentals and the associated opportunity for learning leverage.
  
  

Other pages at this website

• Nature of Learning Leverage: This website page speaks to the >i>significant opportunity for learning leverage that is made possible by articulating a framework of Innovation’s fundamentals: In short, cultivating a population of innovation agents.
• The page also points to a learning limiter, which is addressable but important to recognize: Unlike plentiful examples of Algebra problems, there isn’t a ready bank of Innovation examples tailored for use within instruction to support student understanding of Innovation’s unifying concepts.
• The page also includes a link to an associated document with detail and sources regarding the opportunity for learning leverage.


• Sketch of Potential New Tool: Illustrating just one way to provide a collection of concrete Innovation examples, to address the learning limiter mentioned above, this page of the website provides a sketch of: a searchable online gallery of wide-ranging innovation examples:
• Where each example, or profile, in the gallery depicts innovation’s fundamentals as a constant across the widely-varying examples
• And tags capture each example’s types of variation to allow for search (also supported by gallery filters).


• Gallery Prototype: This page of the website provides a simple prototype version of the tool for a searchable online gallery of Innovation examples. As a simple prototype, this gallery doesn’t include all that is depicted by the sketch of a potential tool. The prototype features only a small number of concrete Innovation profiles and does not yet include search capability.

WIDE-ANGLE LENS –> Innovation’s Fundamentals in Relation to Science & Invention

ZOOMING IN –> Begin to Unpack Innovation’s Fundamentals

Entries in the “Innovation” column of the table are unpacked in brief just below.

See also links to:

• Document discussing sources of this provisional presentation of Innovation’s fundamentals.
• Bibliography listing comprehensive sources related to the fundamentals and also to the related opportunity for learning leverage.

WHAT is Innovation

“Change by way of value” is an expression used by Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University, to describe what innovation is exactly.

In other words, value is innovation’s fundamental catalyst for change:

• “Where value is determined by customers.”


• The change that is catalyzed by new value put out into the world — e.g., in the form of offering a product or experience — occurs only if it is adopted by “customers.” Practitioners may seek to influence customers. But it is customers who serve as the gatekeepers of innovation’s change. The practitioner stance can be described as “inner-driven and other-focused.”


• Consider the history of the electric car: First built by an English inventor in the 1880s, the early potential of electric vehicles in the U.S. was eclipsed by customer interest in the Model-T. It took another 100 years for U.S. customer interest in the value of electric vehicles to take hold. By 2014, a range of eletric vehicle models were available for sale throughout the U.S., following development of a national battery charging infrastructure, reduced cost of batteries for the vehicles, vehicle design, and more.


• As put by business thought leader, Peter Drucker: “The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user.”[9]

WHERE does Innovation Happen?

At large scale, Innovation happens in the overall economy — typically in what is known as the “commercial production system” (for-profit businesses) or in the “social production system” (non-profit and/or government organizations, including schools, hospitals, and much more).

In the words of Peter Drucker: “… (I)nnovation is an effect in economy and society, a change in the behavior of customers, of teachers, of farmers, of eye surgeons – of people in general. Or it is a change in how people work and produce something.”[23]

• Drucker called new value enabled by new technology as only the “cutting edge of the knife” — far from the whole knife. In other words, offerings of new value do not require association with new technology.
• In fact, Drucker described that Innovation’s practice pertains to “all activities of human beings other than those one might term ‘existential’ rather than ‘social.’”[22] Change by way of value can be catalyzed almost anywhere, including in K-12 classrooms, neighborhoods, extracurricular organizations, etc., and from most any type of new offering.

Finally, although it has been said that “all innovation is social,” Stephen Goldsmith noted two distinctions regarding innovation in what he termed the “social production system” — a system that represents value produced by nonprofits, government, etc., and includes many of the organizations operating in fields like Education, Public Health, and Natural Resources. The distinctions Goldsmith points out might be thought of as a “differential” for the social production system:

• First, the change to be catalyzed often is change in human behavior or capability, which can pose a special challenge beyond “purchase” of an offering proposing new value. For example, change in this system can require use of the offering and even effective use (e.g., Narcan to reverse a drug overdose). Plus, in certain fields (e.g., Education) there may be multiple levels of users (e.g., teachers and students), with effective use of an offering needed at each level to realize the effect of resource leverage.


• Second, the humans doing this changing are not necessarily the purchasers of the offering. Thus, “value” must catalyze adoption among both purchasers and users.

HOW does Innovation Happen?

Ideas plus Action.

Innovation’s methods — for both ideas and action — are rooted in its core creative structure of hypotheses (purposeful new connections of existing knowledge). Again, the imagination … see possible new connections before …

Whether the hypotheses are tacit or explicit, Innovation’s methods feature two complementary types. Both types of hypotheses are needed:

• “What could be” as new value to customers — compelling enough to catalyze adoption.
• “How the new value could become” an offering accessible to, and adopted by, customers — hypotheses that determine a roadmap for effective action.”

This combination of hypotheses can be viewed as fitting within the context of the “business model canvas,” depicted just below, where the main cell of “core value proposition” represents “what could be,” and all of the other canvas cells represent hypotheses for “how it could become.”

Notably, this canvas context for innovation hypotheses was adopted by the National Science Foundation for use in training scientists in innovation’s methods.

Innovation thought leader, Clayton Christensen, described innovation as distinctively “integrating and applying” knowledge.

Innovation’s “what” and “how” hypotheses typically integrate knowledge from core strands, such as:

• industry/operations knowledge
• customer knowledge
• human, social & technological knowledge
• anything and everything.

“Artificial Intelligence” might also be listed as a core strand of knowledge in order to bring it forward as it is still emerging. Eventually, AI might represent a standard technology and fit under “human, social & technological knowledge.”

With respect to “anything and everything,” Steve Jobs provides an example in referring to his undergraduate experience with calligraphy as integral to his development of fonts for Apple computer systems. In Jobs’ view: “Not everybody has the same experiences, so …

Notable too … DISCERNING …

WHO Generates & Acts on Innovation’s Hypotheses?

The work of generating and acting on a new offering’s collection of “what” and “how” hypotheses is typically cross-functional — including participation by individuals with varying specialized perspective or knowledge (e.g., communications, design, finance, science, engineering).

For example, when Google’s two computer-scientist founders had identified an approach to search that they viewed as offering more value to customers than what was then widely available, it was a colleague who contributed the key “how” hypothesis for generating revenue, which was based on proposed new value to advertisers.

As with the Google revenue example, it’s likely that offering new value suffuses innovation’s array of “how” hypotheses and its overall practice — not just the “what could be” hypothesis. As another example, consider the “partners” cell of the Business Model Canvas: Prospective partners must find compelling new value in a proposal for partnering in support of the “what could be” new value.

The Ocean Cleanup https://theoceancleanup.com/ offering provides an example. In 2012, when the Ocean Cleanup’s young founder, Boyan Slat, needed the support of technical experts to serve as resources to help him develop his novel “what could be” concept for removing plastic from oceans, he delivered a TED Talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROW9F-c0kIQ.

• The talk drew early voluntary contributions from technical experts around the world, with the voluntary nature of these integral contributions speaking to the value that experts found in participating.
• In this situation, one could say that the technical experts were customers of an offering of compelling work — in particular, work that engaged their strengths and their interests.
• To fast forward over ten years, in November 2025, the Ocean Cleanup announced https://x.com/TheOceanCleanup/status/1994414824583844306 over social media: “This year, we’ve been collecting an average of 53 kilos of trash every minute.”

If it’s correct that value suffuses Innovation’s “what” and “how” hypotheses, this would amplify the notion of “change by way of value.”

Innovation’s overall “how” typically involves a cross-functional team, composed of those who possess pertinent knowledge and skills — not necessarily expert knowledge and skills — who generate and act on innovation’s distinctive types of hypotheses.