In this article, we ask "how can we judge whether a policy initiative produces innovation?". We focus first on the concept of innovation, touching on some aspects of its recent development, noting a resurgence of interest in it over the past few years in the schools policy field in England and proposing a tentative definition. We, then, refer to the national initiative known as Diversity Pathfinders (DP), of which we are conducting an evaluation, and briefly consider the implications of the idea of "pathfinding" and related notions. Finally, we describe some possible examples of innovations from our DP case studies and draw some conclusions for thinking about and researching innovations. (Contains 1 note.)