I believe the intent is very much for OKRs to enable innovation. They certainly do not "capture" it, though, since that would require doing the innovation first

I believe the intent is very much for OKRs to enable innovation. They certainly do not "capture" it, though, since that would require doing the innovation first and then forming OKRs around it, and the whole point (in my limited understanding) of OKRs is to set out objectives that you don't know how to accomplish. Come up with an objective, innovate in order to achieve it, keep yourself from going too far off track by tracking the results against thresholds you decided at the beginning (rather than adjusted or invented to match what's actually happening.) And somehow resist the temptation to invert the flow, where people justify what they're doing as fitting into an OKR rather than the OKR motivating their choice of what to do. (That's the part I'm getting wrong right now.)