An oh so true and insightful column on page 1 of yesterday’s WSJ B section by a Dennis Berman:  A Riddle:  Is a Peanut Butter Pop-Tart an ‘Innovation’?    (Sorry, behind pay wall.)

Wonderful quote:   “Most CEOs now spray the word “innovation” as if it were an air freshener.”

It IS the magic word … but rapidly becoming devoid of meaning. ‘New & Improved’ has been confused with the truly ground-breaking and, sadly, most pundits and analysts are missing the point.

Too many executives get away with this code-word instead of getting serious about the difference between creating new markets and new demand versus what they really mean:  Doing what it takes to win today’s market share battle.  Berman nails it:

They used to call it competitiveness—a word fraught with the implication that others might win. Now it has been elevated to innovation, a more regal way to describe what business has always done:  Adapt.

Behind this poverty of language lurks a huge strategic problem for many firms. What I too often see is that companies confuse the regimen of competing with the act of innovating. Since their stage gate process and supply chain constraints appear to act equally against the merely competitive “new and improved” and the truly “new to the world”, they put these activities on equal footing. This leads to wasting time and resources on the former at the expense of the latter.

Because of the costs, bottlenecks and lack of flexibility in supply chains and various stage gate “processes”, management ham-handedly tries to streamline and “cut waste”. In the end, they settle for a system that is less responsive, less competitive and less innovative.

What really needs to happen is a careful separation of the stream of competitively required, low value activities from the truly inventive and potential blockbuster development work.  The goal would be a two-track system that, on the one hand, could actually produce more low value activities, more quickly; while, on the other hand, carefully and quietly cultivates those big innovations that could grow new markets or new demand streams.

Walk + chew gum + same time … what a novel idea!