Glossary

Innovation de-risking is the practice of identifying, anticipating, validating, and reducing avoidable errors that can increase the likelihood of failure in innovation projects. It is about innovating better, not less: accelerating learning, improving decision quality, reducing wasted resources, and preventing errors from compounding before they become costly.

Innovation capability building develops the skills, judgment, methods, shared language, and autonomy that teams and organizations need to innovate in real-world contexts of high uncertainty, risk, and ambiguity. It goes beyond training: the goal is to turn innovation into a sustainable operational capability.

Complex challenges are high-impact economic, social, institutional, or sector-level problems with no obvious solution and no single right way to frame them. They require method, exploration, transdisciplinary collaboration across stakeholders, and multiple perspectives to be understood and addressed rigorously.

Applied research is research aimed at producing useful knowledge to address concrete challenges in organizations and real-world contexts. At IFI, it is supported by transdisciplinary teams from Universidad de San Andrés and can generate actionable learning, tailored solutions, and shared intellectual property. It provides a foundation for R&D.

Action research is a form of applied research that generates knowledge while intervening in a real-world problem. It integrates analysis, experimentation, learning, reflection, and continuous adjustment to improve both the understanding of the challenge and the quality of possible solutions.

Innovation methodologies are frameworks, tools, and processes that help teams explore challenges, make critical assumptions visible, reduce ambiguity, accelerate learning, and structure the development of solutions in uncertain, complex, and high-risk contexts. At IFI, these methodologies are applied through a transdisciplinary lens.

Ecosystem development connects public, private, academic, and social stakeholders around shared challenges and goals. It helps combine capabilities, distribute risk, enrich perspectives, coordinate collective action, and accelerate learning that no single organization could generate on its own.

Transdisciplinary innovation integrates knowledge, methods, capabilities, and perspectives from different disciplines, sectors, and stakeholders to better understand complex challenges in real-world contexts and develop actionable, high-impact solutions. It is IFI’s core differentiator: it is not only about bringing disciplines together, but about integrating academic knowledge, practical experience, and situated learning to address problems that exceed any single organization or field of expertise.

An innovation hub is an institutional platform that connects knowledge, capabilities, stakeholders, methodologies, and real-world application contexts to address complex challenges, accelerate learning, and turn innovation into a systematic practice. IFI is the innovation hub of Universidad de San Andrés: it brings together academia, industry, government, and society to develop transdisciplinary innovation from Latin America to the world.

Prototyping is the process of building preliminary representations of a solution to explore it, communicate it, test assumptions, learn from user interaction, and understand how it could work in practice before moving toward further iterations, implementation, or scaling.

Early validation is the process of testing assumptions, needs, alternatives, or prototypes before significant resources are committed. It helps teams learn quickly, identify foreseeable errors, reduce uncertainty, and improve decision quality.

Critical assumptions are key hypotheses that must hold true for a problem framing, decision, or solution to work. Identifying them helps focus experimentation, reduce uncertainty, and avoid moving forward based on unvalidated premises.

An implementation roadmap organizes the steps, decisions, resources, owners, timelines, and lessons learned required to move a solution from validation toward implementation, scaling, or further iterations.

Shared intellectual property refers to knowledge, methodologies, solutions, patents, or other assets generated through a joint project between the university and an organization. Ownership, use, exploitation rights, and transfer conditions are defined on a case-by-case basis at the start of each project.

Applied innovation in Latin America turns knowledge, capabilities, and transdisciplinary collaboration into concrete solutions for the region’s challenges. It starts from real Latin American contexts, recognizes their specific constraints and opportunities, and works with both local impact and global relevance in mind.