Innovation: the latest hype, fad, silver bullet, savior, …?

Have you ever had one of those moments where all you wanted to do is scream and ask for forgiveness? I had mine last night, after noting that yet another person has a title containing innovation. I felt a sudden fear that my message was lost in a sea of look-alikes, and it is difficult for the rest of you to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Don’t get me wrong: studying innovation and technology management is still my love and fascination, and I’ll continue to sweat over it as I have for the past decade. However, I have to stand back and question the current hype of the term, including the use of it in my title: “Innovation and Technology Management”.

If you step back a second, you would think that with so many calling themselves the innovation something or another, our innovation scores and return on our investments should be so much better. Unfortunately that is far from the truth. Take a look at the BusinessWeek data from 2005 on industry innovation’s success rates: based on the article “up to 96% of all new projects fail to meet or beat targets for return on investment”. Fortunately for us innovation experts, it is also difficult to measure the success rates, as there is no one universal definition of success within and between firms. As such, the validity of all available data on the topic can be argued.

So, is innovation really hype? Only if you place the value of innovation on the same level as the downloadable cell phone ringer functionality, or maybe the Atkins diet. Lets face it, men have been inventing and innovating since the wheel. I am a big fan of Peter Drucker, and over a decade ago he published Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Since 1991 “Drucker Innovation Awards” have been given for nonprofit innovations. Given the ideas and challenges of innovation have been around quite a while, then why is the sudden silver bullet-like fad-ness of the topic?

It is certainly plausible to blame the management consultants that ride the tail of innovation, or the CEOs looking for ways to continuously deliver top line growth to ever more demanding shareholders. Either way, in some strange way, I should welcome the increased focus on innovation, as it does generate and circulate ideas, best practices and potentially simple solutions to complex innovation problems. Even so, I’m changing my title on my business card, but keeping the company slogan. After all, innovation is only as good as the value it delivers, and that requires effective innovation management.