The issue of value invention in logic programming embraces many scenarios, such as logic programming with function symbols, object oriented logic languages, inter-operability with external sources of knowledge, set unification. This paper introduces a framework embedding value invention in a general context. The class of programs having a suitable (but, in general, not decidable) ‘finite grounding property’ is identified, and the class of ‘value invention restricted’ programs is introduced. Value invention restricted programs have the finite grounding property and can be decided in polynomial time. They are, in a sense, the broadest polynomially decidable class having this property, whenever no assumption can be made about the nature of invented values (while this latter is the case in the specific literature about logic programming with function symbols). Relationships with existing formalisms are eventually discussed; in particular, value invention restricted programs subsume ω-restricted programs and are incomparable with finitary programs.