People are using the term innovation without grasping its full meaning. This has led to the term being misused and becoming an industry cliché. There’s a process to innovation, due to its misuse it often leads to innovation theater as described by Steve Blank. Revolving around companies applying innovation through methods that create no value to the company and society. In my opinion, innovation is a slow process that doesn’t always start with a great idea/ideas, it is more about its impact.

You may ask how can we describe “impact” and what you can call innovation?

A word I would use to classify innovation would be “transcendence.” Meaning a brand new, unique, and perplexing idea that is a breakthrough in markets and provides a value proposition to customers. From large firms like Apple to startup, this sentence will apply, when talking about innovation we have to consider the current market and its customers, not all ideas need to be considered the next “iPhone”. The challenge is finding “innovation” that proposes value through impact in a market segment, it is simply not sufficient to just design a new idea if the new idea has no impact to the customers.

A clear example I can think of is electric cars in 2008 when tesla released its new car, at the time many people saw it as innovative and breakthrough. However, there was no value proposition to customers, there was no infrastructure for electric cars, cars were inefficient, and people didn’t see their money worth in comparison to gasoline cars in the market. Tesla was on the verge of bankruptcy many times, even though they always had an innovative idea, the issue was that their unique idea in its early days had no value proposition to the market of vehicles, in turn not resonating with possible customers. Finally, it was not until more infrastructure and their electric vehicles improved massively that their innovation skyrocketed and continues to be an industry breakthrough. On a final note, considering the history of Tesla I would also say that it takes persistence and constant improvement in your innovation in order to succeed.