For all of you dim bulbers who are students of business fads and buzzwords, I think we're about to witness one of the major turning points in our chosen field of dabble:
"Innovation" is about to get replaced with something else. I don't know what it is, or when it'll happen, exactly. But I can just feel it. Can you?
Innovation has had a great run, mostly because it's so gloriously vague; in fact, it has a conflict inherent in its definition, as "to innovate" is to try to somehow update something that's already established. That old/new thing is manna from heaven for a business fad because such dichotomies scream out for endless explanations, amplifications, and projects that require complicated gantt project management charts to describe what defies simple, declarative sentences.
Companies have been challenged on innovation much the same way as comrades in the Soviet Union were dared to be patriots. It was never an end result that could be measured, but rather an aspirational ideal, pursued via an incessantly variable process that was never properly realized, or thereafter durable.
Like party officials, a generation of management consultants and business school grads made a comfortable living lecturing companies on innovation and, like all really good buzzwords, companies incorporated it into their values, mission statements, messaging, and the other subtle strains of branding nonsense. A generation of middle-managers had their job descriptions rewritten so they could focus on educating and monitoring their fellows on their innovation-ness.
Only now, most of the those middle-managers have been let go; companies large and small are well along dismantling the Berlin Wall of Innovation -- separating the purity of business fad from the realities of the marketplace -- because, like their brethren in East Germany, they effectively awoke one morning to see that there was no there there. Lives aren't better. Stuff doesn't get sold more often, or more profitably, just like all those mock-heroic propaganda posters couldn't distract a population from the unpleasant reality of their lives.
What we're left with are the empty concrete high-rises, and the drab mediocrity of balance sheets leaden with a has-been fad.
Innovation was never a stand-alone philosophy, religion, or management approach, any more than globalization, outsourcing, or customer-centricity. It was simply the catchy patina of insight and poetry that smart marketers -- in academia, and in the services vendors who feed in the wake of its affirmation -- applied to the boringly constants and unsexy truths of business management.
God forbid Harvard Business School or McKinsey admitted that the keys to effective competitive business strategy now were no different than they were 100 years ago; the details have changed, but that's the stuff of vocational training. And there's no serious money in that business.
So as companies today are reevaluating the resources they commit to pursuing innovative purity, I'm sure the gurus are dreaming up the next fad and commensurate buzzword. My pick: collaboration. All the nonsense of social media -- from the technology, to the social and as-yet incomprehensible economics -- seems just tailor-made for something far more than a marketing department experiment.
Companies will get lectured on its importance above all else. Graduate courses will be taught, and expert consultants will create immense slides and charts on what it means. Perhaps the next generation of employees, though a smaller group, will get their lives committed to this higher ideal. Everyone will focus on enabling it the "right" way.
Come to think of it, that's innovation!
