Educational innovation occupies a central place in contemporary pedagogical discourse. Over the last decades, pedagogical innovation has generated a power of attraction and consensus among multiple actors inside and outside the field of education who see it as an end in itself, actionable through public policies—i.e., top-down. Among the most prominent actors in this regard are international organisations such as the European Commission, the OECD, or UNESCO. While these organisations have shown special interest in educational governance and management as the main drivers of change, more recently they have turned their attention to pedagogical aspects that had been hitherto ignored. In this context, guided—and legitimised—by the rhetoric of these transnational actors and by a conception of innovation focused on pedagogical aspects, several countries have been recently promoting policies that seek to make pedagogical innovation the guiding principle of teaching and learning and organisational practices in schools in order to 'modernise' or 'transform' their education systems. This has been the case of the autonomous region of Catalonia (Spain), where the school innovation imperative has become the backbone of recent administrative-pedagogical policy initiatives aiming at 'transforming' the education system. Considering this case, in this paper we combine different theories of the public policy process to understand how the discourse of innovation has moved from the pedagogical arena to the educational policy field, and with what outcomes. Policy process theories allow us to analyse the articulation of educational problems and their solutions, and the conditions under which certain solutions are more likely to penetrate the public agenda. The results of the study show how in Catalonia educational innovation initiatives have been strongly advocated by policy entrepreneurs operating at the intersection of the philanthropic and the public sectors. These entrepreneurs define innovation as opposed to the so-called 'traditional education' and it is framed as a solution around the ideas of 'personalisation of learning', 'competence-based education' and 'school networking'. Thanks to its apparent simplicity, but also its ambiguity and inherent desirability, the idea of innovation has operated as a 'coalition magnet' able to attract previously distant educational stakeholders—both public and private—and to organise them around an influential agenda of 'educational transformation'. The plausibility of the innovation initiatives arises in a singular political and economic context, thus allowing innovation to become the flagship and one of the priorities of recent Catalan education policy.

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