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I am guessing this happens to other innovation champions. But periodically I’ve noticed that when I start talking about how important innovation is, I invariably hear from a peer, client or even a media colleague that innovation is “just” a buzzword.
As one of those innovation champions, I confess I get a bit defensive: Do people think I want to slap a big, blinking sign saying “INNOVATION!” everywhere? Or do they think I’m caught up in the hype, and I just don’t get that innovation is just sooo 2005?
I sometimes like to remind them that the same is true of concepts like the internet. In fact in 1999, I attended the last Internet Showcase conference — the last because the dot.com boom had gone bust, the capital had dried up, and there was a huge sense of deflation and soul-searching going on. The conference itself was full of people wondering aloud, "how could we have been so wrong?" and "How could we have gotten so swept up in the hype?"
But there was also a persistent thread to the conversation about how we weren't wrong. As one person said, "We were wrong about a specific impact of the internet, that is, that it would be the absolute end of bricks and mortar commerce. But we weren’t wrong about the internet" and its impact as a whole. He was right.
But back to the innovation word. I raise the question because I got into a hype-word conversation this week with my colleagues WE’s Studio D - our group of content and digital gurus who love to toss around what content is sticky, or as we now like to call it, "slippery," meaning it moves easily between people. The discussion was prompted by a list of the most used and abused buzzwords in press releases these days. "Innovative," "innovator," and "innovation" are prominent on this list, at numbers 9, 10, and 16, respectively.
Should these words be banished from our vocabulary because they’re overused and diluted to the point of being meaningless? Yes and no.
Any conversation must distinguish between form and substance. The substance of innovation is of incredibly high value. The concepts matter; that’s why they’re so persistent. (In fact, they matter more than ever these days.) And we need words to have conversations which will make innovation actually happen.
So we actually DO need to talk about innovation, a lot. We should ALL be telling innovation stories. But what is important is not the words we use but whether the words point to strategies, actions, impacts, results. A bunch of words do not make it so.
That said, the cautionary piece: If you’re communicating about innovation, remember innovation is the takeaway. But as with any of the other leads on the buzzword list (leader, unique, revolutionary) you can’t have it just by “claiming it.” And there IS innovation hype (A case in point: a book about sock innovation).
A phrase we like so much in the Social Innovation Practice at Waggener Edstrom that we have actually trademarked it is intended to capture the priority of substance first and foremost: “BE the story you want to tell.” Show versus tell” is another way to look at it. I think this is the right spirit for conversations about innovation.
So let’s focus more on the doing and showing, and less on the claiming. But let’s not be confused — the reason “innovation” has achieved buzzword status is that, quite frankly, people are desperate to be associated with it. And that’s why the “I” word will be around for many years to come. |
