Forget Innovation – Renovation is Better

This is not an article about how innovation is dead in the troubled times since 2008.  On the contrary.  I argue that widespread innovation may not have been in its ascendancy until the global economic meltdown.

In good times, really, innovation doesn’t happen.  Improvement, yes.  Invention, sure.  Innovation, not so much.  We use the word “innovation” for successful improvement projects, because it sounds better, but most change in good times is about improving (sometimes radically improving) how we do the things we already do.  

Innovation, strictly speaking, is when we really change what we do in life and business.  It is a shift in our core concept.  We do not typically engage in this kind of change when we are doing well under the status quo.  But when prosperity in the status quo collapses, people start to rethink not only how to do what they do today, but to embrace radical alternatives – new business models, job retraining, shifts to new industries.  The buggy-whip maker, no longer able to prop up its dying line with easy financing, becomes a leather clothes maker. 

There appears to be an inverse relationship between the level of talk about innovation and the level of real innovation.  We talk a lot about innovation during boom times, when what we really see is strong improvement and invention, but very little true innovation.  Now notice how quickly talk about innovation has dried up since September 2008.  Yet, the level of real innovation since then has skyrocketed. People laid off from major companies are starting new companies of their own, using their severance package to get a start on the dream they have been keeping on ice for years. Companies facing bankruptcy are letting go of failing lines of business that relied upon excessive consumer spending and shifting to new offerings that appeal to more frugal customers. Lots of jobs are lost, but totally new jobs are starting to be created.

The real problem with innovation is that it has become a catch-all for anything that seems new that we want to praise.  So I’m giving up the word.  Let the improvers call themselves innovators.  

There is a better word.  Renovation.  When you renovate, you have to blow out walls, rip out old plumbing, sometimes tear down the whole house. Then you take the usable old bits and bring in new materials, change the floor-plan, employ new ideas for what a house is supposed to be, and rebuild.  If the economist Joseph Schumpeter was right, and innovation is the process of creative destruction, then in today’s lingo,renovation comes closer to the mark than our corrupt old favorite word, innovation.

In troubled times, it is time to start renovating.

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