One telling anecdote in my research into innovation history is this striking observation: inventors, creators, and leaders, the people who earned fame for the work other people call innovative rarely used that word themselves. Instead their vocabularies leaned heavily on words like problem, experiment, solve, exploration, change, risk and prototype. Powerful words. Words that are either verbs, or imply a set of actions. And more to the point, they care less about being innovative than they do about making things. Making good things. Forget creating a breakthrough: it's hard enough to make a really good thing that people will love to use. Most markets are in desperate need of affordable, high quality goods that live up to half the promises their advertising make for them.
Scott Berkun, "Why Innovation Is Overrated," Harvard Business Online, 14 July 2008, http://discussionleader.hbsp.com/berkun/2008/07/why-innovation-is-overrated.html.
