The word innovation emphasizes the new or novel, but this interpretation leads to misunderstandings.

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For example, most of us would agree that the movable type press, gunpowder, and the compass represented great innovations in the era of the European Renaissance, transforming society in many ways. But many will discover with surprise that these three innovations were already known in China centuries before. For this reason, strictly speaking, they were not "novelties" although they were in Europe. And citing another example, the Vikings knew the compass and their fur suits competed with the best current thermal suits, in addition to arousing current admiration for their knowledge of forging, making swords that, according to some experts, they had nothing to envy. the best samurai swords.

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The implicit paradox in these examples leads us to an interesting confrontation of two historical paradigms: the linear paradigm, which considers the accumulation of knowledge over time, therefore, whoever comes after necessarily knows more than whoever has lived before, and another vision, which considers historical cycles. Thus, we found that, in Roman times, it was common to reproduce legal texts on publicly exposed bronze plates, implying that many citizens could read. While, in the Middle Ages, that is, hundreds of years later in the same geographical space, the stained glass windows of Gothic cathedrals were the main way of telling the stories of the Bible, since the population was illiterate.

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So what is innovation, only what is strictly new or also what was already known in the past and has been rediscovered, a kind of "fashion" that returns? Let the reader find a satisfying answer and move on to a formal definition of the concept of innovation:

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According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) innovation is “the introduction of a new, or significantly improved, product (good or service), a process, a marketing method or a new organizational method, in the internal practices of the company, the organization in the workplace or in external relations ”(OECD, 2005, p.56).” Thus, the OECD recognizes four forms of innovation: product, process, marketing or organization. There are also other innovation classifications such as the one that distinguishes between incremental and disruptive innovations.

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We suggest the usefulness of broadening our vision of what innovation is to integrate what we now know about the functions of the two cerebral hemispheres. Thus, we have discovered the complementary functions of the left cerebral hemisphere, which it analyzes, and the right cerebral hemisphere, which synthesizes and integrates.

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From this point of view, innovation would be both engineering as a result of analysis - which generally translates into new technologies - and new paradigms and new visions, the fruit of creative imagination. One of the great human capabilities rooted in the right brain hemisphere.

If, in addition, these new visions have altruistic ends and are translated into an increase in the common good, rather than in selfish transfers of resources to the few, then we can truly speak of innovations for the common good.

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When human beings consider the good of our fellow human beings and of society in a broad sense, a great creativity awakens in us and our creations are closer to the natural and ecological order.