There is a growing consensus that the United States and its regions, including the Midwest region, will increasingly compete on innovation. This also is widely recognized in the business world. There is also growing consensus that innovation talent--the human talent to drive and support innovation--will be a major key. Despite this consensus, however, there is surprisingly little agreement on how innovation is defined, and there is little agreement on what is needed to produce a new generation of innovation talent that can drive and support innovation in both the public and private sectors. Many early research and policy reports focused mainly on scientific and technological innovation and the need to prepare more scientists and engineers and a larger science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) focused workforce. However, this early focus did not fully capture the role of entrepreneurship and the growing importance of business-model innovation that is driving growth in many sectors. It also did not capture the innovation work being done in the public and private sectors addressing large complex social, economic, and technological challenges. The major challenge in the coming years will be developing a widely shared understanding of innovation and innovation talent and how to best produce innovation talent throughout the P-20 educational pipeline, including two-year educational institutions. The Illinois Innovation Talent Project provides a useful example for exploring these questions. This article provides an overview of the Illinois Innovation Talent Project and the working definition of "innovation" used in the project and then explores implications for re-visioning the role of two-year colleges in producing innovation talent. The article first defines innovation, explores how companies are reorganizing work and learning to promote innovation, and then examines some of the implications for developing innovation talent. The authors then provide an overview of the Illinois Innovation Talent Project and its integration within a larger Illinois P-20 STEM initiative and conclude with implications for two-year educational institutions.