Inside the conceptual innovation. The Huffington Post case study.

Novelty of meanings carried out by a new concept lay at the heart of different types of radical innovation, such as product, process or business model. The paper investigates the generation of novelty as a process of conceptual innovation. In studying conceptual innovation, we depart from research that has been conceiving it as just a stage of a new product development project, claiming that conceptual innovation is an inner dimension of any novelty generation process. Through the case study of The Huffington Post we deepen the research on what a conceptual innovation is and what are the sources of this innovation. We show how THP brought into the newspaper sector a truly innovative concept of journalism, that is an original and creative combination of two conceptual spaces: newspaper and blog. With our research we provide new original evidence of the salient features of a conceptual innovation and contribute theoretically to the recent cognitive perspective on innovation