One of my pet peeves is the incorrect or misuse of phrases and words. I have written about how everyone has started overusing summit, awesome and crushing it. My good pal, Hunter Walk is keeping a rolling list of over-used tech words as well. This morning when I saw a blog post by Mozilla Chairperson Mitchell Baker, I was a tad annoyed by the causal use of the phrase innovation. Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client hasn’t been innovative for a long time so to say you are going to stop continued innovation is just nonsense. They have not been working on it for a long time.

It is not her. Today professional writers use the phrase “innovation” loosely, I feel we have no hope. The other day, I read a blog post about a company being called innovative after it copied a three-year-old feature.

It is not that hard to understand what innovation means. All you have to do is type “innovation” and go to Wikipedia and see that innovation can roughly be defined as “the creation of better or more effective products, processes, services, technologies, or ideas that are readily available to markets, governments, and society.”

7 thoughts on “Innovation – yet another overused word”

  1. I never carried it forward to the national level; but, for a time I owned a statewide copyright for in/nova/tion – the intent being to demonstrate the root of the concept “nova”.

    Come to think of it, I did get a few bucks when I sold it before I left New England.

  3. Om, my innovation blog New Florence. New Renaissance profiles 400 to 600 innovative products, projects, people each year in infotech, biotech, nanotech, cleantech etc. I scrounge a wide range of sources as I describe in post below. Yes, the term is often abused, but it calls for more diligence on our part to reward the many truly impressive things that are being worked on. The risk is we let the C products and players ruin it for the A team…

    http://dealarchitect.typepad.com/deal_architect/2012/06/the-art-of-sourcing-innovation-stories.html

  5. I love the thunderbird reference. It amazes me that products think that just because they are adding new features that they are “innovative”. The examples I love is Nero and Roxio which started off doing a really good thing and through their “innovation”, made the products bloatware.

    I recently blogged about innovation in the context of social business and came to realize that innovation is not only having ideas, but executing on them . Most people think that innovating is coming up with an idea and then throwing it over the wall and they should be lauded as a hero for having a great idea. In truth, being innovative not only requires good ideas, but the ability to execute…it’s not easy, it requires tenacity and perseverance.

    http://greg2dot0.com/2012/06/12/innovate-better/

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