Innovation—easy to say, hard to do. As we labored to compile 100 innovators for this year’s CIO-100 list, we kept stopping to ask, Wait a minute, just what is innovation? A lot of people use the word glibly—the business equivalent of "I woke up this morning and had tea instead of coffee. Wasn’t that innovative of me?" So we would pause and reaffirm that to us, innovation meant turning one’s knowledge or capabilities into money by creating new products, processes or relationships that yield competitive advantage.

Then we’d reimmerse ourselves in the topic of innovation and think ourselves into circles until we’d ask, Wait a minute, why does innovation matter? When we lifted our heads, our vision would clear and we’d remember the answer: business success.

Innovation is an essential nutrient for growth. That’s particularly true in lean economic times. As many have cleverly said, you can’t downsize your way to growth or save your way to prosperity. Organizations may find it tempting to the point of necessity to trim R&D and other innovation initiatives when times get tough, but that is a dubious path to success (see Slowdowns Are the Best Times to Invest).

Not every invention can be as momentous as the wheel or the internal combustion engine or the Internet (thank God—imagine the chaos). Smaller developments can have lifesaving effects for businesses too. For example, using integrated map and data software as well as a wireless LAN was enough to give CIO-100 honoree Southwest Gas a huge boost in productivity, and therefore profitability. Those smaller scale innovations raise an intriguing question: What actually constitutes innovation, as opposed to simply change or improvement? This is a topic tackled by thought leaders, academicians and practitioners?and recently by our CIO-100 editorial team in selecting this year’s 100 companies. When is an upgrade just an upgrade, or when does it open whole new vistas? Predictably and inconveniently, there’s no quantitative and agreed-on answer. For instance, even incremental change can be innovative, when it seeks to do more than just fix things that should have been done right the first time around.