If we’re going to navigate economic disruption, we need first to disrupt our innovation.
If we’re going to navigate economic disruption, we need first to disrupt our innovation.
Corporate buzzwords are a dime a dozen. Business schools and Board retreats and MBA candidates are rife with words like synergies, strategic direction, leveraging our strengths, and pivot. And we can add to the pile of buzzwords this one:
Innovation.
The problem with buzzwords is that they take a concept that is actually quite important, but through its overuse, it loses all meaning. It’s a bit like adding too much salt to a good clam chowder or spaghetti sauce – you need some, but too much salt will ruin the dish. The result is confusion rather than clarity.
As a buzzword, innovation is out of control. I asked ChatGPT to count the number of times the word appears on the websites of ten randomly selected Fortune 500 companies in the U.S. It wasn’t actually able to do a precise count (it said something about me needing to set up a “reproduceable script” that could “crawl” the websites to give a precise answer). But it did provide an estimate.
Overall, there were hundreds to low thousands of occurrences of the word innovate on these corporate websites. That’s a lot of salt ruining the clam chowder.
The danger is that, as a concept, innovation is too important to be overused and thus become meaningless. This is especially worrisome in this era of economic volatility and political chaos.
My definition of innovation, one that I used in my first book on economic disruption, is this: “The use of an existing technology, or the combination of multiple technologies, in a new and unique way, to produce something useful or solve a problem.”
I know that is not everyone’s definition, but I think it encapsulates how important the term is. And it distinguishes it from two other related concepts: invention (the creation of something completely new and unprecedented), and design improvement (the continuous tweaking of a system or technology to increase its usefulness).
Innovation lives in the space between pure invention, and continuous design improvement.
For example, the internal combustion engine (ICE) first appeared in Belgium in 1860. It represented something brand new. It was a true invention.
The application of the ICE to a horse-drawn carriage gave us the automobile. The combination of these two existing technologies – the ICE and the carriage – gave us the automobile. This is innovation.
And the decades of improvements in the construction of the automobile, from Henry Ford’s assembly line right up to the GPS capabilities to today’s vehicles, represented thousands of design improvements.
Companies and MBA students and C-suite executives need to be asking themselves: are we just saying we are innovative? Or are we truly innovating? What are we doing that combines existing technologies to create something new, useful and commercially valuable?
A new flavour of soft drink is not an innovation. Neither is the thinness of the new Apple iPhone 17 phone an innovation. Nor the new features of an on-line bank app. These are design improvements, and they have use and value.
Innovation is more a way of thinking than simply design improvement.
The world has a lot of problems at the moment, many of them wrapped up in geopolitics, war, crumbling democracies and populist rage. But lurking in the shadow of these headline-grabbing events are other serious problems: extreme weather, micro-plastics, health epidemics, social isolation and dying oceans.
If we are going to navigate our way through this swirl of change, volatility, and confusion, we need truly innovative solutions. Let’s stop saying we’re innovative, and actually change our mentality to become innovative.
