The following article examines the transformation of the ideas of the Austrian-American planner John Friedmann, on regional and urban planning, during his time as the director of the Urban and Regional Development Advisory Program of the Ford Foundation in Chile (urdapic, 1965-1969). Friedmann coins the notion of innovative planning as a new paradigm that supplants the rational, scientific basis of development planning by conceiving action as the engine for structural change in underdeveloped countries. These ideas are framed in the transformations that took place during Eduardo Frei Montalva's government (1964-1969), acknowledging that it is in the feedback between politics and technique that Friedmann's ideas acquired significance.