Recognizing Innovation

I work for a large multinational software company outside of Seattle. We pride ourselves on being innovators, and indeed many of the things we take for granted in the technology world today were created by this company. My job is in IT. One of our primary goals is to use the company’s software to run the company’s business, and in that we are very successful. In fact, I and other members of our team are often called on to speak to leaders of other companies about how we leverage our products to manage the nuts and bolts of our day-to-day operations, and how they can do the same.

Just last week I was in a meeting with developers and managers from our extended team where we tried to agree on a technical solution to a fairly straightforward problem, and the lead developer for the solution under discussion said that if we adopted his methods it would help us to support future innovation. His proposal used off-the-shelf software built by our company to manage data tracking with a minimum of customization. My question (unspoken, because it was not relevant to whether or not we would agree to use his code) was whether or not modifying an existing product can ever be considered “innovation”.

Webster’s Dictionary defines innovation this way – 1: to introduce as or as if new; 2 (archaic): to effect a change in; 3: to make changes. Under this definition our developer certainly could claim to be innovative. But in my mind something was clearly missing.

The dictionary definition equates change with innovation. But the word “change” can have a positive or negative connotation – change is not always good. By implication, innovation is always good. Can a bad change be innovative? And does the word innovation lose its meaning when applied to just any old change?

I’ll admit my bias. I think creating something that has a positive impact and has never been seen before is innovation. And I don’t think that customizing packaged software meets that bar. Since this keeps coming up in business and technical discussions, I decided there had to be a way to express my frustration with the loose use of the word innovation, and a few years ago I finally figured out how to say what I meant.

The person who looked at a field of wheat and saw Shredded Wheat was an innovator. The person who looked at Shredded Wheat and thought how nice it would be with frosting was not an innovator. It always gets a laugh when I bring it up, and it never changes anyone’s mind. In the software business, telling a developer they haven’t innovated is like saying their baby is ugly.

Imagine then how thrilled I was with the advertising campaign from Post Cereals last year that marketed Shredded Wheat as “anti-innovation”, a product that hasn’t changed in over 100 years and has no intention of doing so now.




As fun as it was to share this with my colleagues, I recognized that the marketers fell into the same trap of assuming that change equals innovation. Think about that when your organization wants to claim the innovation prize. The second definition of “change” in Webster's is “a fresh set of clothes”. A good leader knows when to praise (and sell) innovation and how to recognize when what’s before them is nothing more than a fresh set of clothes.