“Innovation” is a much used term, but generally refers to the process of making something new and useful available to people. In business terms,  it refers to bringing something new to the marketplace, and is differentiated from “Invention“. Technical innovations almost always start with an invention, but many inventions never make it to the market and hence, do not become innovations. The process of translating an invention into an innovation is a difficult one; Opinnovate provides services to assist with this transition.

“Open Innovation” describes the proactive use of resources external to an organization to accelerate innovation. Dr. Henry Chesbrough is generally attributed with developing the concept. The Center for Open Innovation of the  Haas School of  Business at UC Berkeley  maintains  many useful references on the theory and practice of Open Innovation.