Raising the I-Bar

Whats the most abused and worn-out word this decade?My top vote is on

Innovation.If you have a statement of vision or mission, that word is probably

part of it. If you are building a new statement, its your must-have word.

Google returns 95 million hits on this word, which beats even millennium or

quantum (65 million hits each) or seamless (25 million) or scenario (53

million). Okay, theres worse. Experience, for one, gets 787 million hits (the

iPhone ex-perience, the India experience). Google itself gets 1.6 billion.

Innovation is fashionable. Everyone talks about it. Companies happi-ly lower

the bar, using innovation to describe every incremental change. Every new

product and mini-version-variant released with a different color or price. Any

slightly-altered business process, or repainted building, or new restaurant

menu. We in the print media speak of advertisement gatefolds and tab inserts

(which some readers find intrusive) as innovative ads.

Innovation is the act of introducing something really new, or substantially

different, not a small change. It must be a new paradigm (21 million hits), not

a change of bumper and tail-lights to get a new car variant. Apples products

over the years have been radically different and desirable, each setting a new

benchmark for user experience.

The creators of the Macbook Air and the Lenovo X300 had to reinvent a lot of

things to come up with the worlds thinnest notebooks. Tatas Nano had to almost

reinvent the wheelto meet the $2500 price target required radically new

thinking and ab-initio design (they applied for over 30 patents in the process).

Its not just products. Fords process innovation, circa 1910, the moving

assembly line, made the affordable motor car possible. The offshore call center

was a remarkable innovation, and impacted business worldwide. Indian tech

companies have made dramatic process changes, in areas such as service deliv-ery

and quality, and even HR: some are real innovations. Theres no universal

measure (though patents granted could be one of them).

The trouble with setting the bar low is that it discourages true innovation,

a critical need in a crowded, competitive world. Companies need to be able to

engender, encourage and foster real innovationwhile allowing for failure.

A top reason for the lack of true innovation is the fear of failure, a strong

cultural factor in India. Unlikely in Silicon Valley, where its okay to fail

and to try again, failure is life and death in India (school students kill

themselves over it.) The entrepreneurship boom is a happy sign, and contrary to

this fear-of-failure culture.

We desperately need to stop talking about innovation, and go out and just do

it, with the bar set really high.