The problem with "innovation"

Richard L. Hudson, Editor

It’s very simple. Just count the number of times that the word “innovation” appears in business media. We offer the following chart, compiled through a search in news database Factiva, over the past 20 years. It tracks perfectly the inflation of the Internet bubble in the 1990s, the subsequent bear market - and more recently, the re-inflation of the tech market. Just look at it. Sell, I say.

What is this thing, innovation, that everybody in business is talking about? It’s the new plot, apparently, to another war-game from Electronic Arts. It’s something that dairy farmers in Chile say they want. It’s in the job title of a new executive at France’s Schneider Electric. It describes a new prize for erotic art in Australia. It’s in countless corporate slogans. It’s epidemic now in public policy, with many learned reports on nurturing it, identifying it, funding it or freeing it. (True confessions: Science|Business itself is a guilty party, with the publication of our “Innovation Manifesto”, 9 October. Well, it takes one to know one.)

In a less-hyped age, all these things went by different, and differentiating, names. GM had a new model. A publisher had a latest edition. A researcher had results to publish or, if a very big deal, a discovery. A politician was trying to promote productivity, or jobs creation. But all this linguistic precision is swept aside by “innovation” and “innovative”. It can mean anything you like: new, cool, unusual, modern, efficient, productive….

Naturally, this state of affairs can’t last – and the first sign of trouble came to my attention last week at Helsinki, at IST Event 2006, an exhibition organised by the European Commission for tech projects in its Information Society programs. With more than 4,000 attendees, it was an orgy of “innovation”. But Bernd Hartmann, of a regional development organization called MFG Baden-Württemberg, had some sobering data.

Hartmann’s colleagues surveyed the people in Germany who use the i-word most often – corporate communications folk and journalists. What they found is that a credibility gap has opened between the two communities: the companies want to talk about their innovations, but the journalists don’t want to write about them.

• 62.5 per cent of the PR people say innovation is on their agenda. Among the journalists, it’s 43.8 per cent.
• 71.3 per cent of journalists agree that “innovation themes are often presented as advertisement. Therefore they do not meet the standards for press coverage.” Among the communications specialists, it’s 48.1 per cent.
• On one point, more than 86 per cent of both groups agree: “The topic ‘innovation’ is overly used and often misused.”

There’s a wealth of other data in the survey – and it does beg the question of how, if journalists supposedly don’t want to write about innovation, our Innovation Index keeps rising. But the basic point is clear: Enough, already. For the sake of innovative industries everywhere, Science|Business welcomes suggestions on our TalkBack discussion forum for innovative alternatives to “innovation”, just click here.