Innovation: Is Innovation Really Just a Buzz Word?

Innovation.  While  innovation is often thought of as a ground-breaking discovery or invention, something that leapfrogs a pattern of incremental improvements.  We’re told that innovation done right can bring about revolutionary changes, and we see that ‘innovative’ companies like Apple can make a lot of money.  Innovation has become something that the business world is currently obsessed with.

But innovation isn’t easy to get right.  And some are saying now that the term innovation has been over-hyped and over-used.  Everyone wants to now be thought of as ‘innovative’ and increasingly ‘innovative’ is used by companies when describing themselves.  Actually, depending on how you define innovation, it’s not that hard to be ‘innovative’.  After all, the definition of innovation from Merriam Webster is simply ‘the introduction of something new’.

The Wall Street Journal has recently run a series of articles on the hype around innovation.  In a study of 2011 annual reports, the WSJ found that the word ‘innovation’ was used more than 33 thousand times.  43 percent of large companies now say that they’ve installed innovation officers or created roles of similar function.  28 percent of business schools now use the word ‘innovate’ as part of their school mission statement.

Driven by intense interest in the topic, business schools are tailoring programs specifically around innovation.  Entrepreneurship programs are now beginning to share the stage with innovation.  San Francisco’s School of Management, for example, renamed its MBA major from ‘Entrepreneurship’ to ‘Entrepreneurship and Innovation’.  And the University of Portland’s Pamplin School of Business now offers an undergraduate major in “entrepreneurship and innovation” management.

Companies increasingly describe their new products or services as ‘innovative’.  The WSJ asks “But are these achievements really innovative?”  Probably ‘different’, maybe not ‘revolutionary’ in their improvements.  The conclusion of the WSJ is that ‘Innovation’ is just a buzzword.

But ‘innovation’ is not a buzzword confined to just the US.  The European Union, for example, publishes an Innovation Union Scoreboard that ranks the level of innovation across Union countries.  Germany ranks the highest with 80 percent of German companies classified as innovative.  And according to this index, even 56 percent of Estonian companies are innovative.