What is innovation?

- [Narrator] Throughout my career, I've had the great fortune to work with thousands of the best and brightest minds from almost every industry around the world. I've coached pioneers from Aerospace and Defense, automotive, chemicals, consumer products, energy, food and beverage, financial, medical, manufacturing, semiconductor, software and other sectors. Every person I've coached has had the same goal; Mastering innovation. Yet if I were to put any five of them together in a room, and asked for their definition of innovation, I'm certain I'd get ten different answers. To say that the word innovation has been widely used and misused for the past twenty years would be an understatement. I'd like to share some perspectives on the origins, meaning and uses of the word innovation that I've observed through the years. So what's the real definition of innovation? The Oxford English Dictionary defines innovations as the action of process of innovating or a new method, idea, or product. Honestly, that's not much help. I recently conducted a social media poll asking respondents to select whether innovation was defined as a process, a product, or something else. By a three to one margin, respondents thought that innovation was a process. When we look at the origin of the root word innovate, it traces it's lineage to the Latin word novare, which means to make new combined with the prefix in, meaning into. This produces the Latin word innovare which meant to renew, alter, or make new. Innovare eventually transformed to innovate around the mid sixteenth century, and was defined as to make changes in something established, especially by introducing by new methods, ideas or products. By this atomology of the word, innovation really relates to renewal. So how has the usage of the word innovation evolved over time? Google's Books project has scanned over twenty five million books dating from 1800 to 2012, and provides computational linguistic tools to anyone who wishes to analyze that corpus. When I looked at the usage of the word innovation over the two hundred and twelve year period, I found that the word innovation had slight academic usage, which actually decreased from 1800 to the mid 1930s. When a sudden spike in broad usage appeared in books from 1938 which was likely attributable to World War II. From 1963 through 1971, usage grew exponentially, eclipsing the usage seen over the previous hundred and sixty three years. Given that the world was swept up in a space race and the technology advancements needed to win it, the increased discussions of innovation is really no surprise. Another interesting development during those same eight years was the emergence of the explicit use of innovation as a proper noun or a name. Discussion of innovation as a process really came into it's own during the Apollo era and has grown ever since. From 1999 to 2012, usage frequency became hyperbolic as the .com new economy era was literally fueled by how many times the word innovation could be used in marketing copy. As we've moved into present day 2020, the usage trend as I've observed has flattened a bit. But it's not due to any waning interest. The discussion of innovation has become commingled with new technologies and capabilities, including additive manufacturing, the internet of things, machine learning, and digital transformation. No matter what the context or goal is driving the innovation discussion, it's important to remember that successful innovation management leverages methodologies and repeatable practices. Perhaps our biggest challenge in understanding what innovation means isn't whether we're referring to a process or an invention, but instead understanding the motivation behind it.