What makes a company innovative?

As a corporate attribute, innovation could be defined as the ability to avoid isomorphism (the tendency of organizations to progressively resemble their normative environment), to be able to come up with new ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services, or improvement in offering such goods or services. Innovation allows companies to tackle the current needs of current customers (incremental innovation) or to drastically affect the variables that the market takes into consideration when approaching that need, product, or service (disruptive innovation) - in some occasions even creating a new mar-ket.
Innovative companies are not necessarily companies that invent things, since innovation usually reflects more the use or application of an idea or method rather than the creation of the idea or method itself. But innovative companies should be able to do something beyond just improvement - since improvement typically refers to doing the same thing better instead of doing something different or following a different approach. Innovative companies are able to understand that innovation may come from anywhere, from any contextual variable, to an idea that emerges anywhere in the organization, and have differential expertise on the technologies or methodologies that allows them to focus on their users [ … ]