Ideally, the notion of innovation enables paving the avenue of research towards evaluation of sustainability in all research areas dealing with the built environment, also real estate. While innovativeness can be understood as an extension of the current paradigm in urban real estate economics, it can also be understood as an alternative paradigm involving more evolutionary perspectives. What happens in the mother discipline of general economics is a reasonable prediction of what eventually will happen in applied disciplines such as real estate economics. However, given the vast differences between physical and asset-oriented views of real estate, it is realistic to assume inertia among real estate economists trained in neoclassical economics in adapting new concepts such as evolutionary dynamics, in which case some other discipline (economic geography, for instance) must set the cross-disciplinary agenda. This paper reviews various literatures involved in this adaption of the innovation-concept and seeks to make connections across them. It argues for the need for real estate economists to open up horizons for dialogue with other disciplines.