Is Innovation the Most Abused Word In Business?

In my opinion, an innovation is something that no one thought of before and that performs better than its predecessors. It is not a synonym for invention or discovery. Take graphene for example. People had been working with it in various forms (usually called "exfoliated graphite") for decades because it has all the interesting properties of graphite, but with an enormous surface-area to volume ratio. Theorists predicted interesting properties in single, isolated sheets of graphite, and there was some evidence to support it, but nothing really came of it. Then someone got the idea to use scotch tape to rip off a few layers of graphene from bulk graphite, which eventually lead to a Nobel prize. The innovation wasn't the scotch tape, or the graphene, or even using scotch tape to exfoliate a laminar material; it was using scotch tape to exfoliate graphite.

That one little innovation allowed all kinds of measurements that validated the intriguing properties of graphene and sparked a deluge of research across the physical sciences. Now, let's contrast it to something like the iPhone. Was that an innovation? I say no. Everyone had thought of the smartphone already--they were just waiting for the technology to catch up to expectation. People were using proto-iPads to keep track of stock trades decades [npr.org] before the iPod existed.

I think that in the business world, success is equivalent to money and innovation drives success, therefore anything that makes money is innovative. And since things that make money are generally popular, they use the word "innovation" to describe creating something that is popular, which essentially boils down to having the right idea or product and the right time.Thus Apple--which makes very popular, well-designed products--has become synonymous with innovation. I'm not knocking Apple; convincing people to enter their credit card information in order to use a device that they already bought is pure genius. But what have they done that is really de novo, that was more than just clever or marketed effectively?

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/iZTLAQ5U0gk/is-innovation-the-most-abused-word-in-business

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