Human-centered innovation is the practice of creating valuable new offerings, processes, and business models by starting from real human needs — then building the culture, roles, and systems that make ingenuity sustainable, not episodic.
This glossary defines the language of human-centered innovation, innovation culture, continuous innovation, the Nine Innovation Roles, the Innovation Maturity Assessment, intrapreneurship, and related practitioner terms. Definitions are written for innovation leaders, product and experience teams, intrapreneurs, consultants, and executives who want shared vocabulary for moving from random sparks to a sustainable culture of ingenuity.
Compiled and maintained by Braden Kelley — author of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire, creator of the Nine Innovation Roles and Innovation Maturity Assessment. Last updated: July 2026.
Related: Future Readiness Glossary · Human-Centered Change Glossary
What Is Human-Centered Innovation?
Human-centered innovation starts with people — customers, employees, partners, and communities — and builds solutions, experiences, and business models around their needs, behaviors, and contexts. It pairs creative methods with organizational design: clear roles, maturity, portfolio discipline, and the change capability required for ideas to land.
In Braden Kelley’s work, human-centered innovation is practical and cultural. Frameworks such as the Nine Innovation Roles, the Innovation Maturity Assessment, and the Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit help organizations remove barriers and build sustainable ingenuity — themes developed in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.
How to Use This Glossary
- Each entry opens with a concise definition suitable for citation.
- Braden Kelley frameworks (Nine Innovation Roles, maturity model, toolkit concepts) are defined explicitly.
- Use alongside the Future Readiness and Human-Centered Change glossaries when foresight, innovation, and adoption must work as one system.
A
- Adjacent Innovation
- Innovation that extends the organization into related customers, offerings, or capabilities — beyond core improvements, short of full transformation.
- Adoption (of Innovation)
- The degree to which customers or employees willingly use a new offering or way of working as intended. Innovation without adoption is unfinished work.
- Ambidextrous Organization
- An organization that can exploit today’s business efficiently while exploring tomorrow’s opportunities — without letting either mode destroy the other.
- Artist (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In Braden Kelley’s Nine Innovation Roles, the Artist may not always originate the idea, but excels at making ideas better through craft, refinement, and creative improvement.
B
- Barrier to Innovation
- A structural, cultural, process, incentive, or capability blockage that slows or stops ideas from becoming value. Identifying and removing barriers is a central theme of Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.
- Business Model Innovation
- Changing how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value — not only what product it sells. Often the highest-leverage form of innovation.
C
- Collaborative Innovation
- Innovation practiced as a team sport across roles, functions, and sometimes partners — rather than as the private domain of a few “creative” individuals.
- Commercialization
- Turning a validated idea into an offering that can be delivered, sold, supported, and scaled. Many innovation systems fail here, not at ideation.
- Connector (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Connector links people and ideas — for example matching a Conscript’s insight with a Revolutionary, or an Artist with the Troubleshooter an idea needs.
- Conscript (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Conscript has strong ideas but does not willingly share them — often because they do not know ideas are sought, lack a way to express them, prefer to keep their head down and execute, or all three.
- Constrained Innovation
- Innovation that improves because limits — time, capital, regulation, compute, attention, or design constraints — force sharper choices. Constraints often focus breakthroughs rather than block them.
- Continuous Innovation
- An operating system for generating, testing, selecting, and scaling ideas on an ongoing basis — not in episodic campaigns or annual contests.
- Core Innovation
- Improvements that strengthen the current business, customers, and economics. Necessary for performance today; insufficient alone for long-term relevance.
- Creative Destruction
- The process by which new innovations displace older products, firms, or practices. Healthy innovation cultures renew themselves before markets force destruction.
- Creativity vs. Innovation
- Creativity generates novel ideas; innovation converts ideas into adopted value. Organizations need both — and the roles and systems that connect them.
- Cross-Functional Innovation
- Innovation work that intentionally mixes disciplines (product, design, engineering, marketing, operations, finance, frontline) so ideas survive contact with reality.
- Customer Champion (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Customer Champion lives close to the customer — understanding needs, behaviors, and context nearly as well as interviewing a real customer about a nascent idea.
- Customer-Centered Innovation
- Innovation guided by customer jobs, pains, gains, and experiences. A major subset of human-centered innovation, which also includes employees and other stakeholders.
D
- Design Thinking
- A human-centered problem-solving approach emphasizing empathy, framing, ideation, prototyping, and testing. Complements organizational innovation systems when paired with roles, portfolio discipline, and change capability.
- Disruptive Innovation
- Innovation that changes the basis of competition — often starting in overlooked segments or with simpler offerings before moving mainstream and challenging incumbents.
- Discovery
- The front end of innovation focused on learning: unmet needs, insights, opportunities, and problem framing before committing to a solution path.
E
- Evangelist (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Evangelist educates people on what an idea is, builds internal support, and helps customers understand its value.
- Experimentation
- Running small, time-boxed tests to reduce uncertainty about desirability, feasibility, or viability before large irreversible investment.
- Experience Innovation
- Creating new value by redesigning how people experience a product, service, brand, or journey — not only by adding features.
F
- Fail Fast (Learning Fast)
- A cultural and process posture that treats early, inexpensive failure as information. Misused when it becomes careless; powerful when paired with clear learning goals.
- Frugal Innovation
- Creating more value with fewer resources — often through simplicity, clever constraints, and designs that work in demanding conditions.
G
- Growth Innovation
- Innovation aimed at expanding markets, revenue, or usage — through new offerings, channels, segments, or business models.
H
- Human-Centered Innovation
- Innovation that starts from human needs and contexts, then builds solutions and organizational systems so new value can be created, adopted, and sustained. It combines empathy-driven discovery with culture, roles, maturity, and execution — not ideation theater.
- Human-Centered Innovation Toolkit
- A suite of practical tools associated with Braden Kelley’s innovation work (introduced in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and expanded since) designed to bring human-centered thinking into everyday innovation practice.
- Hypothesis-Driven Innovation
- Treating ideas as testable assumptions about customers, value, and delivery — then designing experiments that prove or kill them quickly.
I
- Idea Management
- Systems for capturing, evaluating, developing, and routing ideas. Useful when connected to decision rights and delivery capacity; harmful when it becomes a suggestion box graveyard.
- Ideation
- The generation of candidate ideas. Necessary, but only one stage of the innovation path from insight to commercialization.
- Incremental Innovation
- Small improvements to existing offerings or processes. Essential for competitiveness; insufficient as the only innovation mode.
- Innovation
- The successful introduction of something new that creates value — for customers, the organization, or society — through adoption, not merely invention.
- Innovation Accounting
- Measuring innovation progress with leading learning metrics and portfolio health — not only lagging ROI from mature products.
- Innovation Audit
- Another name commonly used for Braden Kelley’s Innovation Maturity Assessment — a diagnostic of innovation capability and barriers.
- Innovation Blocker
- A person, policy, incentive, or process that systematically kills or delays promising ideas. Sometimes intentional; often structural.
- Innovation Champion
- Someone who advocates for innovation efforts, protects experiments, and helps ideas navigate the organization. Related to — but not identical with — the Evangelist role.
- Innovation Culture
- The shared beliefs, behaviors, incentives, and rituals that determine whether people generate, share, challenge, and ship new ideas. Culture eats ideation tools for breakfast.
- Innovation Funnel
- A staged model where many ideas enter and fewer advance through evaluation, development, and launch. Healthy funnels are fed by insight and emptied by decisions — not by neglect.
- Innovation Governance
- The decision rights, funding rules, portfolio reviews, and escalation paths that allocate attention and capital across innovation efforts.
- Innovation Lab
- A dedicated unit for exploration and experimentation. Succeeds when connected to the core business and customers; fails when isolated as theater.
- Innovation Lifecycle
- The path an idea takes from generation through evaluation to commercialization and scaling. The Nine Innovation Roles are organized around supporting this full path.
- Innovation Maturity
- How systematically an organization can sense opportunities, generate and select ideas, experiment, commercialize, and improve its innovation capability over time.
- Innovation Maturity Assessment
- Braden Kelley’s free 50-question diagnostic (also called the Innovation Audit), introduced in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire. It evaluates innovation capability, surfaces barriers, and scores organizations against a five-level Innovation Maturity Model.
- Innovation Maturity Model
- A staged model of innovation capability — from reactive to continuously improving — used with the Innovation Maturity Assessment to show where an organization stands and what to strengthen next.
- Innovation Metrics
- Indicators of innovation health: pipeline quality, experiment velocity, learning rate, time-to-insight, adoption, and portfolio balance — not vanity idea counts alone.
- Innovation Portfolio
- The mix of core, adjacent, and transformational bets (and horizons) managed together so the organization invests across risk and time.
- Innovation Process
- The repeatable set of stages and practices for moving from insight to launched value. Process without human-centered roles and culture becomes bureaucracy.
- Innovation Strategy
- Choices about where to play and how to win with new value creation — including domains, ambition level, portfolio shape, and capability investments.
- Innovation Theater
- Visible innovation activity (hackathons, posters, labs) that creates the appearance of progress without changing decisions, incentives, or customer outcomes.
- Innovator’s Dilemma
- The challenge successful firms face when optimizing for today’s customers and margins makes it rational to underinvest in disruptive opportunities.
- Insight
- A non-obvious understanding of human needs, behaviors, or system dynamics that opens a valuable opportunity for innovation.
- Intrapreneurship
- Entrepreneurial behavior inside an existing organization — pursuing new offerings or ventures with ownership mindset while navigating corporate constraints.
- Invention vs. Innovation
- Invention creates something new; innovation creates adopted value from novelty. Patents and prototypes are not automatically innovations.
J
- Jobs to Be Done (JTBD)
- A lens for understanding what progress people are trying to make in a situation — useful for framing human-centered innovation opportunities beyond feature requests.
- Judge (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Judge excels at determining what can be made profitably and what is likely to succeed in the marketplace — a critical evaluation function often underweighted in idea-heavy cultures.
K
- Kill Criteria
- Pre-agreed conditions for stopping or pivoting an innovation initiative, protecting capital and attention from sunk-cost bias.
L
- Lean Startup
- A build–measure–learn approach to innovation emphasizing validated learning, MVPs, and rapid iteration under uncertainty.
- Learning Velocity
- How quickly a team converts experiments into reliable insight that changes decisions. A leading indicator of innovation health.
M
- Magic Maker (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, Magic Makers take an idea and make it real — picturing how something will be made and lining up the right resources to make it happen.
- Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
- The smallest version of an offering that enables meaningful learning about customer value with the least effort. Not an excuse to ship unfinished junk.
- Moonshot
- A highly ambitious, transformative innovation bet with large upside and large uncertainty — best held in a portfolio alongside core and adjacent work.
N
- Nine Innovation Roles
- Braden Kelley’s human-centered framework for assembling balanced innovation teams. The nine roles are Revolutionary, Conscript, Connector, Artist, Customer Champion, Troubleshooter, Judge, Magic Maker, and Evangelist. Introduced in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire; when organizations put the right people in the right roles, innovation speed and capacity increase.
- Nine Innovation Roles Quiz
- An interactive assessment that helps individuals identify their dominant innovation role and secondary strengths for team contribution.
- Nine Innovation Roles Group Diagnostic Workshop
- A team workshop format for exploring innovation role mix, identifying missing roles (innovation gaps), and improving team dynamics and execution success.
O
- Open Innovation
- Using external ideas, partners, startups, customers, and ecosystems — not only internal R&D — as sources of innovation.
- Opportunity Area
- A framed space for exploration defined by customer need, market shift, or strategic intent — broader than a single idea, narrower than “innovate everything.”
P
- Pilot
- A limited real-world trial of an innovation under controlled conditions to test value, operations, and adoption before scale.
- Problem Framing
- Defining the right problem worth solving. Poor framing produces elegant solutions to the wrong challenge.
- Process Innovation
- New or significantly improved ways of producing, delivering, or operating — often invisible to customers but decisive for cost, quality, and speed.
- Product Innovation
- New or significantly improved products or features. Powerful when grounded in human need; weak when driven only by competitive feature parity.
- Prototype
- A tangible representation of an idea used to learn — from sketches and storyboards to working models. Prototypes are questions made visible.
Q
- Quiet Innovation
- Valuable innovation that happens without fanfare — often process, experience, or incremental improvements that compound. Easy to undervalue in cultures that celebrate only big launches.
R
- Radical Innovation
- Innovation that represents a major departure from existing offerings or models — higher uncertainty, potentially higher reward.
- Revolutionary (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, the Revolutionary is eager to change things, shake them up, and share opinions. Revolutionaries often contribute the majority of ideas in open ideation settings.
S
- Scaling Innovation
- Expanding a proven innovation across markets, segments, or the enterprise — including operations, support, incentives, and change management.
- Service Innovation
- Creating new value through service design, delivery models, and experience systems — often as important as physical product novelty.
- Stage-Gate
- A gated innovation process with decision points between stages. Works when gates are learning-based; fails when gates become politics without evidence.
- Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire
- Braden Kelley’s book (John Wiley & Sons) — a roadmap to a sustainable culture of ingenuity and purpose. Introduces the Nine Innovation Roles, Innovation Maturity Assessment, and tools for identifying and removing barriers to innovation.
- Sustainable Innovation Culture
- An organizational condition where innovation is continuous, shared, and reinforced — not dependent on a single hero, lab, or campaign.
T
- Three Horizons (Innovation Portfolio)
- A portfolio framing that balances Horizon 1 (core), Horizon 2 (emerging), and Horizon 3 (transformational) innovation so the future is funded while the present performs.
- Transformational Innovation
- Innovation that creates fundamentally new growth engines or operating models — typically higher risk and longer payoff than core innovation.
- Troubleshooter (Nine Innovation Roles)
- In the Nine Innovation Roles, Troubleshooters love tough problems and often have the deep knowledge to help overcome major roadblocks before an idea is ready to be judged or made real.
U
- User-Centered Innovation
- Innovation focused on end users’ needs and usability. Overlaps heavily with human-centered innovation; human-centered practice also weighs employees, partners, and systemic stakeholders.
V
- Validated Learning
- Evidence gained from real customer or user contact that confirms or falsifies a hypothesis — the currency of modern innovation practice.
- Value Innovation
- Creating a leap in value for customers while reshaping cost and competitive factors — associated with blue-ocean style strategic moves.
- Voice of the Customer (VoC)
- Structured listening to customer needs, feedback, and behavior to inform innovation priorities. Strongest when paired with observation and experimentation, not surveys alone.
W
- Wicked Problem
- A complex challenge with incomplete information, conflicting stakeholders, and no single correct solution — requiring iterative, human-centered exploration.
X
- XLM (Experience Level Measure) in Innovation
- Using experience quality as a lens for innovation success — whether new offerings and changes improve how work and life feel for the people involved.
Y
- Yes-And Ideation
- A collaborative ideation stance that builds on others’ ideas before critiquing — increasing generative output and psychological safety.
Z
- Zero-to-One Innovation
- Creating something qualitatively new rather than incremental copies of what already exists — high ambition work that still benefits from human-centered validation.
Human-Centered Innovation FAQ
What is human-centered innovation?
Human-centered innovation is innovation that starts from human needs and contexts, then builds the solutions and organizational systems required for new value to be created, adopted, and sustained — not ideation without delivery.
What are the Nine Innovation Roles?
The Nine Innovation Roles are Braden Kelley’s framework for balanced innovation teams: Revolutionary, Conscript, Connector, Artist, Customer Champion, Troubleshooter, Judge, Magic Maker, and Evangelist. Putting the right people in the right roles increases innovation speed and capacity.
What is the difference between creativity and innovation?
Creativity generates novel ideas. Innovation converts ideas into adopted value. Organizations need both — plus roles, process, and culture that connect them.
What is an Innovation Maturity Assessment?
Braden Kelley’s Innovation Maturity Assessment (also called an Innovation Audit) is a 50-question diagnostic that evaluates innovation capability, surfaces barriers, and scores organizations on a five-level maturity model. It was introduced in Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire.
How does human-centered innovation relate to human-centered change?
Innovation creates the new; change enables adoption. Without human-centered change capability, innovations stall at launch. Without innovation, change programs have nothing valuable to adopt.