By LESLIE KWOH
Got innovation? Just about every company says it does.
Photo: Getty Images.
Companies throw the term “innovation” around but that doesn’t mean they are actually changing anything monumental. Leslie Kwoh reports on digits.
Businesses throw around the term to show they’re on the cutting edge of everything from technology and medicine to snacks and cosmetics. Companies are touting chief innovation officers, innovation teams, innovation strategies and even innovation days.
But that doesn’t mean the companies are actually doing any innovating. Instead they are using the word to convey monumental change when the progress they’re describing is quite ordinary.
Innovation is spectacularly rare around the world except perhaps as a word. Most institutions seem to conflate improvement with innovation. There’s really three forms of improvement. Efficiency gains, or the lowering of the cost of a unit of work. This is the easiest to achieve and most organizations see an annual 3% efficiency gain every year. Then there’s invention which is designing new solutions to existing problems. Innovation requires understanding the world in new terms and discovering new problems that haven’t been surfaced before. That means learning or developing a new language for phenomena. Developing a new semantic space is very hard work and requires a lot of investment. It’s frankly, just rare. It makes sense that innovation is the holy grail of improvement, and like holy grails, there’s a lot of imposters.
@ Peter: I think the most frequent misuse of the term innovative I see is when someone takes an existing practice or product and uses it for a different application. That\’s clever, not innovative…
Amen to that. I also think most people don’t know what innovation is. Of course, now I’m parroting the article. 🙂