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- June 11th, 2008
- 2 Comments »
- Innovation
Practicing what I preach: Innovation abuse
For kicks, and to help practice what i preach, I’ve been tracking the use of the word innovation in the CNBC Business of Innovation series. It’s not good. In fact it’s embarrassing. Part of the problem is the word Innovation appears in the title, which means the I-word gets used at least 6 or 7 times per episode for that alone. And since episode 2 was titled “Innovate or die”, the count jumped again.
Anyway, here’s my count so far. I included all variants (innovative, innovator, innovation, etc.):
Episode 1: 79
Episode 2: 110
Ouch.
A few of the experts chatted backstage during the taping of the first episode about this problem, and we mentioned it to the producers, but it doesn’t appear to have made much of a difference. For a 45 minute show, 72 means 1.6 uses of the i-word per minute. 110 = 2.45 per minute. Wow. If any word gets used that often its a good sign folks aren’t being as clear as they should be.
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- Kishore Balakrishnan’s Blog » Blog Archive » collect words from bbc and cnn in real time and show word clouds - June 12, 2008 at 12:21 am
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Perhaps they should make next version of the show with the title: “The Business of The Process of Creating something new by means of current technologies/methods/ideas being used in a different way or by integrating new “functions” into current processes”
Like in that old children’s game: Tell me about whatever without using the word when or I’ll punch you (what kind of games we used to play… oh God)
So: Let’s talk Innovation without saying the word. I think we can actually come up with a better understanding of a concept when you take away the labeled word from it. It forces you to think. And thinking is good.