Now that the blockchain itself is actually not novel, it was already a part of Git at the time of the Bitcoin white paper. The novel part, I believe, was the proof-of-work concept.
Even proof of work was not novel, there were proposals for fighting email spam with similar techniques. Bitcoin's fortune is combining the right pieces at the right time and getting sufficient buy-in to become relevant and more difficult to ignore.
Yes I take blockchain to mean proof of work (or proof in general) validating blocks such that you can track time to some extent in a system that cannot be sure of time because of being distributed and nodes not being trusted.
