What is innovation?

At a recent Engineering Q&A session, I spoke a bit about the idea of an innovation budget. We’ll accomplish more in the long-term if we protect some space for innovation in addition to maintaining our focus on immediate goals. That sounds great, someone noted in chat, but what did I even mean when I kept talking about innovation?

There are a lot of ways to think about innovation, but for me I always start with the idea of a hill climbing algorithm. You’re at a point in a two dimensional space, e...