What is innovation?

The Big Green Challenge aims to stimulate innovation in response to climate change, challenging people to work together to come up with new approaches that will lead to a 60% reduction of CO2 emissions in their communities. But what is innovation?

We want to encourage fresh thinking about the way we live our lives. An innovation might be a brand new idea, or it might involve combining existing ideas, technologies or approaches in a new way, or finding a way of making an existing solution more effective.

The best innovations might not be technical or scientific – they might, for example, involve reorganising processes or the way people interact, or combining a number of smaller tried-and-tested ideas into a new overall approach.

We see innovation as the successful exploitation of ideas – and those ideas don’t necessarily need to be new ones.

What interesting examples of innovation have you come across recently?