“Innovation” has become a stand-in for “do differently.”
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Post written by
Rana Gujral
Entrepreneur, CEO of Behavioral Signals, investor, founder of Tize and involved with several startups. ’10 Entrepreneurs to follow in 2017′
Getty
Reading a press release or the highlights of a new website for a recent Silicon Valley startup can provide a crash course in marketing buzzwords. Familiar terms like “bootstrap,” “hustle,” “synergy” and “unicorn” litter the lexicon to the point of being near meaningless.
But in my experience, the term that fails in its role of description more than any other is “innovate.” You’ll be hard pressed to find a single mission statement that doesn’t pronounce a company’s “innovative” approach to its particular industry. The problem with this word, though, is that it has become a stand-in for “do differently.”
I am a long-time resident of Silicon Valley and it has been the heart of many of my business ventures in the past two decades. I founded my first company in 2014, which was recognized by The Silicon Review. I am also a frequent speaker at conferences such as the Silicon Valley Smart Future Summit and focus a great number of my investor relations in San Francisco.
This has given me the opportunity to witness the transformation in Silicon Valley and its various levels of innovation over the years. Today, Silicon Valley companies, instead of looking for the next actual innovation – a game-changing reimagining of how people live their lives – are eager for clever phase shifts and incremental upgrades they can tout as the “next big thing.”
It’s reached the point of satire with television shows ( Silicon Valley) and books ( The Big Disruption) skewering the “change at all costs” mentality of Silicon Valley – where the ability to say you’ve done something different trumps the actual change.
