Stop saying innovation – here’s why

(Update: an edited version of this post appears at The Economist)

From all my travels and speaking gigs in 2007, I’m most confident about the following advice: Stop using the word innovation in 2008. Just stop. Right now. Commit to never saying the word again. Einstein, Ford, Leonardo da Vinci, Picasso, and Edison rarely said the word and neither should you. Every crowd I’ve said this to laughed and agreed. The I-word is killing us.

Here’s why: it doesn’t mean anything anymore. Or more specifically, it means many different things. Unless you are taking the time to make sure everyone is using the word the same way, good communication about ideas and creativity is unlikely to happen.

Four tips:

  1. Ask people who use the word what they mean. This is easy. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask “Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?” If they can’t, you’ve just saved the room a ton of time. Often they don’t know: they’re using the i-word as a cop-out for clear thinking.
  2. Use better words instead. Often people mean one of 1) we want new ideas 2) we want better ideas, 3) we want big changes 4) we need to place big bets on new ideas. Great. Any of those short phrases are more powerful and specific than the i-word. Use them instead.
  3. Ban the i-word from e-mails and internal documents. It’s one thing for marketers to use innovation in press releases. It’s another to let that word cloud up how people making things think about what they’re making. Force your team to be precise and give up the crutch of the innovation word. Reward people who use the word sparingly and find better ways to communicate.
  4. Just be good. That’s hard enough. Most things made in the world suck. They really do. If you work somewhere that struggles to make a half-decent product, with the morale of a prison, why are you talking about innovation? You have to get the training wheels off before entering the Daytona 500. If you can making something good, that solves real problems, works reliably, is affordable, and is built by a happy, motivated and well rewarded staff, you’ll kick your competitor’s asses. Focus on solving those real problems. If you succeed on those, innovation, in all its forms, will likely take care of itself.

At lunch 2.0 I talked more about abuse of the word and alternative definitions. Video and podcast.

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29 thoughts on “Stop saying innovation – here’s why”

  • Howard - January 1, 2008 at 4:27 pm #

  • “If you can making something good, that solves real problems, works reliably, is affordable, and is built by a happy, motivated and well rewarded staff, you’ll kick your competitor’s asses. Focus on solving those real problems. If you succeed on those innovation, in all its forms, will likely take care of itself.”

    This is glorious! Do write more about Project Management as it is an important tool for getting things done in the way you are talking about. As you know, Project Management is becoming a more holistic discipline. Take a look at Vertabase – http://www.vertabase.com/news-project-management-software.html for a good example of SaaS that is making that shift.

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  • Chris S. - January 1, 2008 at 5:08 pm #

  • Completely Agree! Maybe it needs to come off of the sub-title of your blog:-)

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  • Scott - January 1, 2008 at 5:29 pm #

  • Chris: You’re right. done :)

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  • Twylite - January 3, 2008 at 9:20 am #

  • No, don’t stop using the word. Use it correctly.

    The tech industry is well on its way to becoming infamous for misunderstanding words or terms and then denigrating them as “buzzwords”.

    Synergy, leverage, productivity, innovation, and other words that have specific meaning within their fields (business and economics) are regularly misused by techs-turned-manager and other uneducated (or at least under-educated for the job) folk who are trying to sound impressive. This basically impoverishes the vocabulary of business, reducing the effectiveness of communication between managers.

    A programmer understands the distinction between a library, a class, a namespace, an object; between a member, a function, and a procedure. The distinctions between these concepts mean nothing to someone without the appropriate technical education, but they make communication between programmers more efficient: rather than asking for a collection of related variables and named code blocks that operate on or with those variables, you can ask for a class (or would that be a namespace? so much meaning in just one word).

    Innovation does NOT mean the creation of new ideas. It is the process of introducing those ideas. In a business (for profit environment) that means using the new ideas (already obtained by invention) to further the goals of the business (loosely, but not entirely correctly: to increase profits). There is a whole lot more meaning in that word, which is why “business people” use “innovate” rather than “introduce new ideas”. Effective communication via a domain-specific vocabulary.

    This has been the accepted meaning of “innovation” since the 1930s (at least; Schumpter IIRC), and has lasted the last 70 years of inventors inventing in sheds and innovators getting rich off the inventions (typically of others).

    My 2c.

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  • Scott - January 3, 2008 at 11:22 am #

  • Twylite wrote:

    > The tech industry is well on its way to
    > becoming infamous for misunderstanding
    > words or terms and then denigrating them
    > as “buzzwords”.

    Well on its way? I think we’re already there :)

    I agree about correct usage, but that’s an uphill battle. What do you when you’re in the room when the word is being used to mean 10 different things without clarification? That’s part of my point. It’s only when someone makes a stink about the abuse of language, or calls BS on someone who uses buzzwords to cover for their lack of thought, that anything good is likely to happen.

    I’ve been cranky about language lately, and I recognize that the definitions of words are social functions and they change all the time – even the people who coin terms don’t have control over them – but I’m still convinced it makes sense for people to fight for clarity of language, and one way to achieve that is to question and probe words are used deliberately to make things unclear.

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  • Frank Boyd - January 7, 2008 at 6:48 am #

  • The first person I heard make this case was Curt Carlson at Stanford Research International when I went there with the BBC. He said he preferred to use the the term ‘value creation’.

    He was really just making a point in the context of his own institution’s need to generate more tangible benefits from its R&D activity.

    And it didn’t stop him calling his recent book on the topic: ‘Innovation’.

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  • Ted Goas - March 3, 2010 at 7:33 pm #

  • Hehe, I agree. The word is over- and mis-used so often. I, too, often have to clarify exactly what someone means when saying “innovation.”

    Definitely earned its way into the library of business jargon that sound nice and mean nothing!

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  • Malcolm McKinnon - August 10, 2011 at 6:15 pm #

  • First, I love the article and agree with the premise: Innovation is often misused.

    Proposed Substitute: “good change”.

    I think “good change” encourages questions and discussion and thus encourages clarity. I think more people would ask the question and feel comfortable answering “what’s good?” than “what’s innovation?”. I also think “change” implies something can be measured and again encourages the follow on question “what change?”.

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