Whats the most abused and worn-out word this decade?My top vote is on Innovation.If you have a statement of vision or mission, that word is probably part of it. If you are building a new statement, its your must-have word.

Google returns 95 million hits on this word, which beats even millennium or quantum (65 million hits each) or seamless (25 million) or scenario (53 million). Okay, theres worse. Experience, for one, gets 787 million hits (the iPhone ex-perience, the India experience). Google itself gets 1.6 billion.

Innovation is fashionable. Everyone talks about it. Companies happi-ly lower the bar, using innovation to describe every incremental change. Every new product and mini-version-variant released with a different color or price. Any slightly-altered business process, or repainted building, or new restaurant menu. We in the print media speak of advertisement gatefolds and tab inserts (which some readers find intrusive) as innovative ads.

Innovation is the act of introducing something really new, or substantially different, not a small change. It must be a new paradigm (21 million hits), not a change of bumper and tail-lights to get a new car variant. Apples products over the years have been radically different and desirable, each setting a new benchmark for user experience.

The creators of the Macbook Air and the Lenovo X300 had to reinvent a lot of things to come up with the worlds thinnest notebooks. Tatas Nano had to almost reinvent the wheelto meet the $2500 price target required radically new thinking and ab-initio design (they applied for over 30 patents in the process).

Its not just products. Fords process innovation, circa 1910, the moving assembly line, made the affordable motor car possible. The offshore call center was a remarkable innovation, and impacted business worldwide. Indian tech companies have made dramatic process changes, in areas such as service deliv-ery and quality, and even HR: some are real innovations. Theres no universal measure (though patents granted could be one of them).

The trouble with setting the bar low is that it discourages true innovation, a critical need in a crowded, competitive world. Companies need to be able to engender, encourage and foster real innovationwhile allowing for failure.

A top reason for the lack of true innovation is the fear of failure, a strong cultural factor in India. Unlikely in Silicon Valley, where its okay to fail and to try again, failure is life and death in India (school students kill themselves over it.) The entrepreneurship boom is a happy sign, and contrary to this fear-of-failure culture.

We desperately need to stop talking about innovation, and go out and just do it, with the bar set really high.

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