Innovation is an abused word. For most of us it’s something that describes anything that sounds new, even though most of what we call innovation is actually more accurately a variation of an original. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines the word as “the introduction of something new,” but then elsewhere it’s also referred to as an alteration, and thus the confusion in how we practice what it describes.

Personally, I see it in the same way as the word “survival,” in the sense that a person can, indeed, survive in a state of barely being alive but breathing. That, by definition, is survival. But if you look at the way that survival is defined by people who are good at doing it, survival does not include the same amount of adversity, or danger.

I think the same way about innovation. If you are doing it just for sake of having a new version of something old, you are barely breathing, but alive. And in the context of creative problem solving, an act of innovation that barely breathes has more to do with ego than the genuine creation of a solution. In the context of the kind of world where innovation has to work in the next few years, something that barely survives is nothing but a toy, albeit one that often costs a truckload of money and launched into the void that it consequently occupies with much fanfare and wondrous hype.

And then, in a short span of time we all wonder what happened to it, and some of us chalk up the demise of these miserable inventions to the fast-paced realities of the modern world, or to competition. But that, again, is a failure of comprehension, because nothing in nature that fails to survive can be blamed on a superior entity that hunts it down and tears it to pieces for lunch.