Cell phones, unraveling the DNA code, the computer chip, Prozac, iPod, Xbox, learning management systems, stem cell research . . . technological innovation abounds. But where are the innovations in HRD research? Why don't we see more innovative research in our journals and at our research conferences? It is axiomatic that innovation is important to HRD researchers and scholarpractitioners. If we are going to lead the field through research, then we need significant breakthroughs that take us to the next version, generation, or level of understanding. We need these groundbreaking findings to facilitate new and unique ways of solving complex and difficult problems. Without innovation we remain limited to maintaining the status quo, to talking to ourselves about the same issues over and over again (a definition of insanity is doing the same things all the time but expecting different results).
Innovation can be thought of as an embodiment or synthesis of knowledge within an original and valued new approach, practice, service, product, or even theory. Innovation can be a breakthrough that is immediate, revolutionary, or radical, resulting in something that is absolutely new, departing from what it was or is. Or it can take a long time to accomplish, be evolutionary and incremental in nature, improving and building on existing knowledge. In either case, innovation is all about change.
Technology-based organizations view innovative advances through the number of patents or expenditures on R&D as ways to account for innovation. How about the organizations that don't collect quantifiable data? What does innovation in HRD look like? What does it mean to do innovative research, and how would we account for it?
To better understand what we mean by innovative research that might be published in HRD-related journals such as the HRDQ, it is necessary to examine both content (HRD-related topical issues) and process (qualitative and quantitative methods). HRD is not unidimensional; it consists of three broad and