If you look up the word "innovation" in Google you'll find in just 0,19 seconds 5.580.000 results. This result is only a small evidence of how much talk there is about innovation. However, most innovation professionals around the world complain about the same factor: many people speak about innovation and being innovative, but just a few really know what they are talking about. What's true about it is that our little word "innovation" suddenly became incredibly sexy.

This reminds me of the 70s and marketing, when the obvious need of coming up with sound marketing strategies, made everybody speak about marketing as if they where really doing something about it. In fact, still in Spain and many other countries you won't find marketing professionals as heads of the marketing departments. Instead you'll find many other professionals that somehow converted themselves into marketing people, but still do not understand the basic marketing strategies or rules. The CFO at ING, then a colleague of mine while I held the CMO position, explained it to me the very first day I joined the company, by saying: "your problem is that we all think we know about marketing because we just 'like' or 'dislike' a campaign; that doesn't happen to a CFO as just a little few will question where to invest or how to calculate the value of new business".  This was, and still is in some cases, true for marketing. However, it is very true about innovation.

The sudden awareness of the urgent need for change and looking into the future in a more structured way, made this little sexy word very popular, trendsetting and chic. However, how would you define innovation? What makes a company innovative?

Personally, I would define it as change to move a step forward, being the objective in the corporate world to increase profits and/or diminish loss.  While considering many definitions for innovation, from the United States Government's to the classical word reference dictionary definition, I concluded that it is better not to define it, but to accept all it's synonyms: change, alteration, revolution, upheaval, transformation, metamorphosis, breakthrough; new measures, new methods, modernization, novelty, newness; creativity, originality, ingenuity, inspiration, inventiveness, shake up. All in all, the one I most like is "revolution".

With the economic downturn around the world, a revolution is needed, and business transformation, just not questionable any longer. However incredible but true, we still need to come up with valid measurements, to prove the business sense behind innovation.

A first exercise to illustrate the importance of innovation, is to analyze how corporate strategies changed over the last fifty years, adapting to market trends in order to maintain EBITDA and profitability rations, according to what the market demanded in each moment.

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