Exnovation means the process of terminating a practice, or the use of a technology or product, within an organization, community, or society. Put simply, it can be described as the opposite of innovation. Exnovation has also been described as the "flipside of innovation",^[1] or the "lesser-known sibling of innovation".^[2]

In commerce and management, exnovation can occur when products and processes that have been tested and confirmed to be best-in-class are standardized to ensure that they are not innovated further.^[3][4][5][6] Companies that have followed exnovation as a strategy to improve organizational performance include General Electric, Ford Motor Company and American Airlines.^[7]

One of the earliest usages of the term came in 1981, when John Kimberly referred to "removal of innovation from an organisation".^[8] In 1996 A. Sandeep provided a modern definition of exnovation as the philosophy of not innovating – in other words, ensuring that best-in-class entities are not innovated further. Since then "exnovation" has become a notable parlance in various practices, from management to medicine.^{[9][10][11][12][13][14]}

In recent years, the concept has been increasingly taken up in sustainability and transition research to designate and investigate the deliberate phase-out of unsustainable technologies, products, and practices, particularly in relation to energy transitions and a coal phase-out.^[15][16][17]

Exnovation and innovation are interrelated: "On the one hand, exnovating products and practices creates spaces for new products and practices. On the other hand, the promise of a new product or practice helps eliminating old products and practices."^[2]

See also

• Collaborative innovation network – a social construct used to describe innovative teams
• Design strategy
• Diffusion of innovations – a theory that seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures
• Frugal innovation – process of reducing the complexity and cost of a good and its production
• Ideas bank – shared resource, usually a website, where people post, exchange, discuss, and polish new ideas
• Open innovation – a paradigm that assumes that organizations can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas
• Pro-innovation bias – the belief that an innovation should be adopted by whole society without the need of its alteration
• Technology forecasting – the prediction of future characteristics of useful technological machines, procedures or techniques
• Technology scouting – a method of technology forecasting
• Nuclear power phase-out
• Coal phase-out
• Phase-out of incandescent light bulbs
• Phase-out of fossil fuel vehicles

References