Gerald Ajam

“Innovation should be novel”

An innovation is new to its setting and better there. Novelty in the world is optional.

Status Position

Published September 2026

All the claims I’m unconvinced bySystems

Usually said

“Innovation should be novel”

The shift

From: New to the world

To: New here, and better here

More precisely

An innovation is a change that is new to its setting and works better there than the next-best option, whether or not it is new to the world.

In short

Sometimes a genuinely new idea is the only way forward. Usually it is not. Much of the useful change in schools and organisations comes from taking something proven elsewhere and making it work here. What counts is whether the change beats the alternative in this setting, and whether it lasts.

The argument

From the claim to a better one

  1. The strongest formulation

    Incremental change cannot solve problems created by the current system. Something genuinely new is sometimes the only way out, and an appetite for novelty keeps an organisation from settling.

  2. Why it is attractive

    Novelty is easy to announce and hard to criticise. Funders, leaders and press reward what has not been seen before.

  3. Where it holds

    It holds where existing options have been tried properly and the constraint is structural. There, a new form can open possibilities that refinement cannot.

    Where it breaks

    It breaks when newness becomes the criterion. Proven practices adapted carefully to a new setting often do more good, and chasing novelty discards the capability built on the last initiative before it pays out. Here the disagreement is partly about values: how much risk a system should take with other people’s children.

  4. What evidence matters

    Rogers’ diffusion of innovations defines an innovation as new to the adopter, and treats reinvention by adopters as normal. Cuban (1986) and Tyack and Cuban (1995) trace a century of classroom technologies promised as transformative and absorbed by existing practice. What matters is the gain over the next-best option in this setting, and whether it lasts.

  5. So, more precisely

    An innovation is a change that is new to its setting and works better there than the next-best option, whether or not it is new to the world.

Reading it

The precise version, word by word

An innovation is a change that is new to its setting1 and works better there3 than the next-best option2, whether or not it is new to the world.

  1. New to its setting

    New to the people adopting it. A practice that is common elsewhere is still an innovation in a place that has never used it.

  2. The next-best option

    The realistic alternative, often the existing practice done well. Beating a weak version of the status quo proves little.

  3. Works better there

    The gain is judged where the change is adopted, and over long enough to see whether it survives once the novelty has worn off.

What it changes in practice

  • Before building something new, look for something that already works and ask what it would take to adapt it.
  • Compare every proposal with the current practice done well.
  • Fund the second and third year of an initiative, when most of the return arrives.

A case, in general terms

An institution has two proposals. One is a new platform nobody else has tried. The other is a peer-tutoring scheme with decades of evidence behind it that has never been run there. The first gets the launch event. The second is more likely to help learners, and by the definition above it is every bit as much an innovation.

Singapore