Innovation Studies

Innovation Studies is the interdisciplinary field that examines how new ideas, technologies, and practices emerge, diffuse, and stabilize within and across organizations, markets, and societies. Unlike the romanticized image of the lone inventor struck by inspiration, Innovation Studies treats innovation as a distributed process: it requires networks of collaboration, institutions that absorb failure, and cultures that tolerate the inefficiency of experimentation.

The field's intellectual roots lie in three traditions: the economics of Joseph Schumpeter, who defined innovation as the engine of creative