We’re starting a series of posts about innovation terms – The Innovator’s Lexicon. We want to provide easy references that expand & improve people’s vocabulary on the topic of innovation, because words matter and being able to define a thing can really help you do the thing.
We’ll get to the term Innovation shortly, but we’re getting things kicked off with a related term: Novelty.
NOVELTY refers to newness, to unfamiliar things. Novelty often correlates with excitement, and one of the most common uses of the word is to describe its absence, as in “the novelty wore off and things felt boring.”
Novelty can be viewed as frivolous or gimmicky, like a novelty song. Ice cream trucks sell “novelties.” However, novelty is also a serious legal requirement for something to be patentable. If a patent application does not demonstrate novelty, it will be rejected.
In the context of innovation (which may or may not be patentable), novelty is the thing that distinguishes an innovative approach from a status quo approach. However, just because something is novel does not mean it is patentable or innovative - more on that next time. Novelty and innovation are not synonyms (even though they’re sometimes used that way).
Finally, novelty is domain specific. That means something might be well known to one group but novel to another group. Novelty also occurs on a spectrum. Something with a low degree of novelty may be a slight variant on a familiar concept. Something with a high degree of novelty might be entirely new.
Stay tuned for more next week!
Image credit famartin
