Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article about the use, overuse, and misuse of the word “innovation” in modern business, particularly with respect to consumer products. The number of instances of S&P 500 CEOs using the word in their earnings calls has doubled since 2007. Sadly, this misuse and overuse threatens to remove all meaning from the word. Witness the example offered in the article’s title: Kellogg’s new peanut butter Pop-Tart, which Kellogg executives tout as one of the most important innovations of 2013. Peanut butter filling instead of cherry or strawberry or chocolate, an innovation? Really?
Next time your boss starts droning on about innovation, it might be helpful to stop and analyze: Is she talking about building the next iPod or the next Pop-Tart? Does “innovate” mean just “stay competitive”? And if so, where is the innovation in that? …
In this context, to innovate can often mean falling short of the word’s Latin roots (of “new creation”). It’s more modest: simply keeping pace with rivals.
They used to call it competitiveness—a word fraught with the implication that others might win. Now it has been elevated to innovation, a more regal way to describe what business has always done: Adapt.
That’s a great point, and it’s a point that Schumpeter and Austrian economists have made for over a century — there are many different ways that firms adapt to the effects of rivalry in markets, and one of them is innovation. But, you might reply, Schumpeter emphasized the role of product differentiation in lessening the effects of rivalry, by making your new product less substitutable for the existing competitor products, and isn’t a peanut butter Pop-Tart an example of product differentiation? (Technically speaking, my answer to that question is no, but that may be me being pedantic, which is what I do …)
That’s where an old post from Roger Pielke Jr. is helpful:
In recent comments I was asked about what I mean when I use the term “innovation.” I use the term as Peter Drucker did:
Innovation is change that creates a new dimension of performance.
Roger tweeted the link to that old post in response to the WSJ peanut butter Pop-Tart article today. Does Drucker’s definition help; is it “operationalizable”? Only if you define “sell more peanut butter Pop-Tarts” as the new dimension of performance!