Innovation, that most desirous property of economic engines, is doubtless hard to facilitate--in many ways, the very definition and nature of innovation precludes its explicit systematization. In its most general form, innovation is firmly rooted in the underlying notion of adventition--to justify this, we begin with the Whiteheadian notion of a philosophic scheme, i.e. the general rational system through which an agent understands experience. If a notion follows from an existing philosophic--or, more generally, interpretive--scheme, it may be said to be an iteration on priorly-known concepts. By contrast, if a notion is found to not immediately logically follow from existing concepts in the agent, and if this notion may be later shown to follow from some subset of priorly-known concepts, then this notion may be said to be an innovation.
Now, in Descartes’ Meditations, a broad category of concepts, adventitious ideas, is defined to include any which "derives its origin from the senses." More generally, an idea exteriorly originated falls into the category of adventition--so here we revise Descartes’ analysis by grounding these categories in the form of an interpretive scheme: both Cartesian "innate" and "factitious" ideas are internally-originated elements native to the interpretive scheme, while adventitious ideas are elements in the interpretive scheme which are products of (or mappings from) processes outside of the rational system. If we can accept that an innovation is a notion which does not clearly follow from a given interpretive scheme, and if adventitious ideas are the bin of concepts originating outside the rational system, then definitionally an innovative notion belongs to a subcategory of more general adventition delineation.
From here, it is straightforward to extend this framing to an industry or economy: a group's consensus--or state of affairs--may be taken as the interpretive scheme. (In situ, the actual state of affairs may be more or less adequately substituted for an actual interpretive scheme: e.g. an industry tends to view possibilities according to the current position of things as, empirically, industries rarely disrupt themselves.) And, for completeness, a consensus may be viewed as the minimum set of mutually-agreed-upon notions which exist among some selection of actors.
If one embarks on a train of thought that is highly rational, it may be viewed as a restriction of mentation to one’s philosophic scheme, and, from the frame of that scheme, such mental actions, when well performed, maintain a continuity of self-consistency over time. However, given the inherent imperfections--the necessary incompletions--of any rational scheme, self-consistency can be over-valued by the living agent. Indeed, as earlier constructions allude, the restrictions of mental action to exclusively-self-consistent yields result in merely iterative ideation or, in the worst case, stagnation. Even were one to appeal to empirical methods to "break out" of the iterative thinking process, a too-strong presupposing stance in the agent--usually, but not always, engendered from pre-existing fears or, roughly equivalently, egoic predispositions--may ruin the attempts at arrestment of the default process.
Generally, the problem may be labeled interpretive solipsism: a mooring, not always immediately voluntarily, to a fixed, and inadequate, interpretive scheme--a construct of our own making, stranding us in stagnating mentation or, in the more extreme pathological cases, a self-made hell. Put another way: if the emphasis is upon an agent's interpretive system, then a system which has restricted its ontology, one way or another, exclusively to conceptual work products isolates interpretation specifically to self-created entities, and thus a solipsism arises. Santayana identified the "solipsism of the present moment," which Whitehead saw as a flawed interpretive scheme without the longitude which rationalism affords. On the other end, Whitehead identified potential solipsistic issues with rational systems: for example, without Kant’s appeal to the "very complex doctrine" of dual aspects of an appearance of a thing and its separate, ultimate form, Kant could find "no real escape from the solipsist difficulty," which, in the case of a philosophical scheme, would be the collapse of one's system into trivial, dissatisfactory tautologies--in Kant’s case, "practical reason" grants admission to experiences outside of purely-conceptual work products.
Whitehead best summed up the rational solipsism difficulty as follows: "[t]he metaphysical first principles can never fail of exemplification. We can never catch the actual world taking a holiday from their sway." In other words, reality precedes, and supervenes upon, interpretation--so thoroughly subordinate is any rational scheme to actuality that any given interpretation is "already effected by antecedent observation," and that "the method of pinning down thought to the strict systematization of detailed discrimination . . . breaks down."
As an aside, it is worth noting that the problem of free will and determinism may arguably be resolved as, in this light, the "belief" in rationally-based determinism--in quotes as the notion of belief, bearing any meaning, presupposes some degree of freedom--may be viewed as a pathological form of philosophic solipsism. If one rejects wholesale the legitimacy of non-rational experience and forever retrenches into the neat boxes of mathematical/linguistic forms, then of course reality itself would be interpreted according to this lens and, given its fixity, may thoroughly mislead the observer. The nature of description is to remove uncertainty, but, as reality itself is the ultimate description of actual entities, uncertainty and unclarity may never be fully eliminated. Indeed, the modern confusion about the nature of rationalism is a troubling regression which speaks ill of our species' prospects as Whitehead gave a tidy definition nearly a hundred years ago: it is simply "the belief that clarity can only be reached by pushing explanation to its utmost limits"--of note, here he clearly draws a careful circumscription around description and rationality itself.
The early twenty-first-century determinists, by living fully inside this boundary, seem in some cases to believe that "history decides" matters of import; and in other cases that some blithe perfection has set in among our society, that a blameless stasis up and down the ranks should be upheld; and in still other cases that we are all bird-brained "stochastic parrots," and that we should structure our entire economy and society around this belief so that very particular bets will pay off for a very particular few--conveniently would they be held blameless under their framework were ill effects to come about or were the entire scheme to fail, yet already do they see their wealth, stature, and power most fitting and well deserved.
Whitehead, in a few words, clears up lifetimes' worth of interpretive missteps. To the pseudo-historians: "The evolution of history can be rationalized by the consideration of the determination of successors by antecedents. But, on the other hand, the evolution of history is incapable of rationalization because it exhibits a selected [state] . . . . No reason, internal to history, can be assigned why that [state], rather than another [state], should have been illustrated . . . . The actual [state] presents itself with the character of being merely 'given.'"
To the pseudo-rationalists suffering from a solipsistically-induced eternalism: "[An actual state of affairs] does not disclose any peculiar character of 'perfection.' On the contrary, the imperfection of the world is the theme of every religion which offers a way of escape, and of every sceptic who deplores the prevailing superstition. The Leibnizian theory of the 'best of possible worlds' is an audacious fudge produced in order to save the face of a Creator constructed by contemporary, and antecedent, theologians."
And, to the would-be obliterators of the essence of humanity:
[T]he final decision of [human beings], constituting the ultimate modification of subjective aim, is the foundation of our experience of responsibility, of approbation or of disapprobation, of self-approval or of self-reproach, of freedom, of emphasis. This element in experience is too large to be put aside merely as misconstruction. It governs the whole tone of human life. It can be illustrated by striking instances from fact or from fiction. But these instances are only conspicuous illustrations of human experience during each hour and each minute. The ultimate freedom of things, lying beyond all determinations, was whispered by Galileo--E pur si muove--freedom for the inquisitors to think wrongly, for Galileo to think rightly, and for the world to move in despite of Galileo and inquisitors.
Innovative mentation, then, follows from a mental system unmoored from a philosophical solipsism. Full immersion in immediate experience, while rich, preempts rationalistic interpretation, and thus the very concept of work product (or, for that matter, conception itself) is inapplicable. How, then, can one balance the engagement of rational systems without falling into the sclerosis they risk? Empirical observation may inject novel information into a conceptual system--indeed, external observation is the traditional Cartesian sense of "adventitious," which is to say that sensory inputs are usually what is considered when looking at exteriorly-sourced ideas. But, again, Descartes did not equate adventitious thoughts to those originated from sense media; rather, he identified a generality, of which sense experiences are a specificity.
Where, then, may other exteriorities originate which may enervate the living agent toward innovative ends? Here, for clarity and brevity, we will not dwell on metaphysical argumentation and instead appeal to our own "practical reason"--namely, the experience of imagination (of which "the subjective enjoyment of experience," as Whitehead termed, underlies). If, from the rational scheme, a sequence of thought consistent with the scheme maintains a kind of continuity over time, then an imaginative thought introduced into this sequence effects a discontinuity (with respect to the rational frame).
And here again did Whitehead offer clarity:
In natural science [rigid empiricism] is the Baconian method of induction, a method which, if consistently pursued, would have left science where it found it. What Bacon omitted was the play of a free imagination . . . . The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.
By taking flight into the more dreamy registers of the mind, a person can think a thought other than that which trivially follows from established concepts. And, as a prerequisite, the thinker must have the capacity to decouple themselves from the orthodoxy of their own--and, no less importantly, others'--minds.
Here, of course, be dragons (and not only according to the rationalistic mapmaker within us which produces what Evelyn Underhill called "diagrams of experience" which are "hopelessly incomplete"). A person may come to believe that some wrongness exists in the common thinking, and, if uncarefully developed, a work product may result which could be worse than useless: it may be quackery. This most lamentable outcome, I believe, breeds an undue reticence at scale, and a remedy may be to internalize that, while failure is a possible outcome of reverie, it is by no means a necessary one.