Innovation, Universities and Skills. The new title of the department offers much food for thought. The title is indeed an intriguing and important one. Bringing the idea of innovation right to the fore is, to use an overworked term, challenging. Pinning down what innovation means is not at all easy. There are three different lines of argument. The first is that educators are about identifying individual innovations in different educational systems, comparing them and drawing lessons from them, for instance to do with what works in building in assessment to different forms of adult education. This could, incidentally, be done in an extremely conservative way, however innovative the projects being observed might be. The second is to carry out research in an innovative way. The third approach, by contrast, is to think about innovation at a systemic level, and to examine how far the education system, or sub-systems, are capable of promoting innovation and what determines this capability. Education has a major part to play in enabling innovation to happen, whether that be in the economy or more broadly.