How to formulate in academic writing when one comes up with a novel approach

Question

In my project work I came up with a new method for solving a certain problem which has not been used before, by extending an already existing approach.

What type of wording should I use in academic writing to express this fact.

I wrote something in the lines of, but would like to have something more elegant:

Furthermore, in my project work I propose a novel approach by extending X and incorporating an xyz mechanism to it in order to get better Z metric

EDIT:

I would also like to say, that "something similar has never been done before to our knowledge"

Answer 1

Given that you are sure of novelty of your work, you can write something like: " to the best of our knowledge, the proposed approach is the first to do...." and show the novelty in your approach.

Answer 2

It's not enough to just say that your approach is novel. You need to make a convincing case that your approach is actually novel. This requires a thorough literature review of existing techniques for the problem you are attacking, together with direct comparisons between your technique and each of those existing techniques.

The message you want to send is "I have read every paper on this topic, and none of them do this thing that I'm about to do." The novice reader will just believe you, but the expert reader, who has probably spent decades thinking about your problem, will look for their favorite handful of papers in your survey. Make sure they find them.

You also need to understand the standards for novelty in your field. The same technique can be considered completely revolutionary in one field and a standard modification of classical textbook methods in another. (Yes, both views can be correct.)

Of course, the real reason to prepare this literature review is to convince yourself that your approach is actually novel. Because it probably isn't. Most “novel” techniques aren't.

Answer 3

This paper presents a novel method for achieving Z metric. The method uses xyz mechanism combined with existing method x. This combination yields performance capabilities relative to z that were previously not possible or feasible with x alone. To support our claim of novelty, the following paragraphs present a comprehensive review of the relevant literature and comparisons to our method.

Then you follow with literature review and comparisons

Answer 4

If the question is indeed about proper wording that balances the novelty / modesty, why not:

Confronted with problem X, I tried all known approachs without success. Further analysis showed that approach Z yelded the closest results to the intended goal. Based on this observation, I worked on a Y mechanism allowing a better metric and, by integrating it with Z approach, developed a novel Z++ approach.