Over the last few decades, the aviation industry has produced several innovative solutions that have benefited the air travel industry and many other industrial and service organisations. However, few attempts have been made to map out these innovations and, more importantly, assess how they add value to aviation businesses. This paper aims to address this gap by providing a Systematic Literature Review to analyse themes, content relationships, approaches, and how innovations create value in this sector. We achieve this aim by analysing 57 peer-reviewed academic publications from 1999 to 2018. The thematic and content analysis made it possible to consolidate the findings by developing an overview of the themes and how innovation has supported them. The results identified ten main themes, i.e. airports, services, management, technology, airlines, system, development, market, customers, and processes. Through the content analysis, 114 value-creating innovations were identified, primarily towards ‘efficiency’, ‘convenience, new features and portfolio differentiation’, and ‘sustainable growth and environment'.