On December 20, 2024 I posted on A comic strip about
flipping prefixes from ex- to in-. The opposite direction also works. There is
an article by Hector P. Rodriguez et al. at The Milbank Quarterly in 2016 (Volume
94 number 3, pages 636 to 653) titled The Exnovation of Chronic Care Management
Processes by Physician Organizations whose opening states:
“Exnovation is the
process of removal of innovations that do not improve organizational
performance, are too disruptive to routine operations, or do not fit well with
the existing organizational strategy, incentives, structure, and/or culture.
John Kimberly first coined the term in 1981 to describe the removal process at
the tail end of the innovation cycle.”
Exnovation isn’t either the Merriam-Webster or Oxford
English dictionaries. But there is a Wikipedia page on Exnovation, and a
LinkedIn Pulse article by Joanne Hagerty on June 24, 2025 titled We Need to
Talk About Exnovation.
There is a more detailed discussion in the 2023 book by Juergen
Howaldt and Christoph Kaletka titled Encyclopedia of Social Innovation (Chapter
10 page 56) which you can read here at Google Books:
“Exnovation ‘occurs when an organization divests itself of
an innovation in which it has previously invested’ (Kimberly 1981, p. 91).
Kimberly offers the example of an organization, which adopted videotape
equipment to record staff meetings. Subsequently, the organization no longer
actively uses the equipment, its popularity fades away, but the equipment is still
there, and costs the organization space and money. Exnovation, in Kimberly’s
sense is the active divestment of the innovation) i.e., here the videotape
equipment), not just discontinued use. He observes that there are several
reasons for exnovating; another innovation replaces the old one, for example
the organization might switch to Zoom recordings, or the innovation might turn
out not to be justified (perhaps, it was just a bad idea to record the meetings
in the first place). The underlying reasons for exnovating might be due to
beliefs about the performance of different technologies, due to imitation of
other organizations, or result from a change in policy support. In short, exnovation
is a rich and complex topic. It is also a topic that is widely ignored due the
prevailing pro-innovation bias in innovation studies (more on this below). In a
few pages of his 1981 article, Kimberly introduces exnovation along with key
considerations for further development.
Subsequent research extended the scope of the definition
beyond organizations and technology. ‘Expanding on Kimberly’s definition, we
understand exnovation as the purposive termination of existing (infra)
structures, technologies, products, and practices’ Heyen et al. 2017, p. 326).
In this wider sense, exnovation depends on actors across social spheres. The extended
definition provides a fertile soil for social innovation research since the
latter calls for a shift from a reductive focus on technological change in
business contexts to one on change of practices across social spheres (Howaldt
et al. 2014) (- SOCIAL INNOVATION AND SOCIAL CHANGE). In light of these
developments, social exnovation can be defined as the deliberate termination
of social practices, and the change in goals and relations as well as materials
and techniques required for this.”
