For centuries, calling someone an innovator was an accusation, not a compliment.
The Latin verb innovare combined in (into) and novare (to make new), meaning to renew or to alter.1 When innovation entered English in the 1540s, it was not a compliment. The word described dangerous novelty, the introduction of something unfamiliar into an established order. In political and religious contexts, to innovate was to destabilize.
Francis Bacon used it cautiously in 1625, arguing that innovation should be measured against time, which is the greatest innovator.2
The transformation of innovation from a suspect to a virtue happened gradually over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the early twentieth century, the economist Joseph Schumpeter placed it at the center of economic theory, describing creative destruction as the process by which new innovations rendered old industries obsolete.3
Schumpeter distinguished between invention (creating something new) and innovation (bringing it to market). The entrepreneur, in his framework, was the agent who turned ideas into economic reality. This distinction separated the laboratory from the economy.4
By the twenty-first century, innovation had become one of the most frequently invoked words in corporate and government language. A word that once warned against disruption became synonymous with it.5