Concepts and universal principles of complex adaptive systems can be found in a large number of scales and areas of application. One of them is related to evolution and can be interpreted as "innovation" on different hierarchical levels both in natural as well as in artificial, and social systems. In this article the claim is made that complex systems can provide a general framework for exploring the phenomenon "innovation" and within which innovation in the more traditional sense can be embedded as one specific manifestation.
In order to prepare the arguments in the following sections, different meanings of the terms "discovery", "invention", and "innovation" are briefly recalled in the following. These terms are related but also differ significantly in their context and application. They do not necessarily imply each other, but often discoveries lead to inventions which then (sometimes) lead to innovations. In a discovery one increases the understanding of one or a group of previously unrelated phenomena.
This improved understanding often but not always can be used to construct a gadget that is novel and specific enough to be patented. For instance the discovery that burning gas expands and during the expansion can perform work eventually led to the invention of the internal combustion engine. On the other hand the discovery of the "beauty" quark has not -and quite possibly never will - lead to any invention. Sometimes inventions like Bell's telephone change the world but it probably is fair to say that most inventions never lead to a commercial product, although some of them might be marketed as "Chindogu" (Japanese for the art of useless inventions).
In contrast to those examples the term "innovation" is usually reserved for "Any idea, practice, or object that is perceived as new by an adopter. These can be processes as well as tools." [Fichman, 1992, Doheney-Farina 1992, after [STTT, 1999]]. Another definition is "the situationally new development and introduction of knowledge-derived tools, artifacts, and devices by which people extend and interact with their environment" [Tornatzky & Fleischer's, 1990, p. 10 after [Prescott & Van Slyke, 1997]]. This definition implies that the innovation is "useful" in some sense for the adopter. Sometimes goal-directed behavior is required as well but here a weaker definition is adopted: it is only assumed that there exists a value function on the space of possible behaviors and that adopting the innovation increases this function value.