Innovation has always had its problems. It’s a meaningless buzzword that leads to confusion and false hope. It’s an event or a hobby that allows executives to check the “Be innovative” box on shareholders’ To-do lists. It’s a massive investment that, if you’re lucky, is break-even.
So, it should be no surprise that interest and investment have dried up to the point that many have declared that innovation is dead.
If you feel an existential crisis coming on, you’re not alone. Heck, I’m about to publish a book titled Unlocking Innovation, which, if innovation is dead, is like publishing “Lean Speed: How to Make Your Horse Eat Less and Go Faster” in 1917 (the year automobiles became more prevalent than horses).
But is innovation really dead?
Yes, innovation is dead.
The word “innovation” is dead, and it’s about time. Despite valiant efforts by academics, consultants, and practitioners to define innovation as something more than a new product, decades of hype have irrevocably reduced it to shiny new objects, fun field trips and events, and wasted time and money.
Good riddance, too. “Innovation” has been used to justify too many half-hearted efforts, avoidable mistakes, and colossal failures to survive.
Except that it is also very much not dead.
While the term “innovation” may have flatlined, the act of innovating – creating something new that creates value – is thriving. AI continues to evolve and find new roles in our daily lives. Labs are growing everything from meat to fabric to new organs. And speaking of organs, three patients in the US received artificial hearts that kept them alive long enough for donor hearts to be found.
The act of innovation isn’t dead because the need for innovation will always exist, and the desire to innovate – to create, evolve, and improve – is fundamentally human.
Innovation is metamorphosing (yes, that’s a real word)
Like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, innovation has been inching along, gobbling up money and people, getting bigger, and taking up more space in offices, budgets, and shareholder calls.
Then, as the shock of the pandemic faded, innovation went into a chrysalis and turned to goo.
Just as a caterpillar must break down completely before becoming something new, we’re watching the old systems dissolve:
- Old terms like innovation and Design Thinking were more likely to elicit a No than a Yes
- Old structures like dedicated internal teams and “labs” were shut down
- Old beliefs that innovation is an end rather than a means to an end faded
This is all good news. Except for one tiny thing…
We don’t know what’s next
Humans hate uncertainty, so we’re responding to the goo-phase in different ways:
- Collapse in defeat, lament the end of human creativity and innovation, and ignore the fact that cutting all investment in creativity and innovation is hastening the end you find so devastating
- Take a deep breath, put our heads down, and keep going because this, too, shall pass.
- Put on our big kid pants, muster some courage, ask questions, and start experimenting
I’ve been in #2 for a while (with brief and frequent visits to #1), but it’s time to move into #3.
I’ll start where I start everything – a question about a word – because, before we can move forward, we need a way to communicate.
If innovation (the term) is dead, what do we use instead?
We’ll explore answers in the next post, so drop your words and definitions in the comments.