Everyone Agrees on Innovation. That’s the Problem
Why we’re talking about different things when we talk about innovation
What do we mean by innovation?
It’s a question that rarely gets asked directly—not because it lacks importance, but because it feels unnecessary. The word is familiar, comfortable, widely used, and, on the surface, widely agreed.
In earlier pieces, I’ve argued that innovation often fails not because we lack ideas, but because we move too quickly—rushing to solutions before we’ve properly understood the problem, or trying to make change stick inside systems not designed to support it. What tends to go unexamined is something quieter that sits underneath both.
Across conversations in public sector teams, universities, policy environments and delivery organisations, a pattern repeats. People agree—often strongly—on the need for more innovation. Heads nod, energy builds, and the conversation moves on. But if you stay with it a little longer, the agreement begins to thin out.
One word, different meanings
What people mean by innovation turns out to vary more than we acknowledge. In one setting, it is about improving service efficiency—doing more, faster, with the same or fewer resources. In another, it points towards new ventures and economic growth: start-ups, scale-ups, productivity. Elsewhere, it takes on a more social dimension, describing new ways of meeting need through community-led responses or different relationships between institutions and the people they serve. And in some corners, it stretches further still, towards changing the conditions that produce problems in the first place—shifting incentives, rules, and flows of power.
The word holds. The meaning moves.
A shared reference point
We tend to talk about innovation as if it were a single, stable idea—something we can define, measure, and scale. In practice, it behaves more like a shared reference point: stable enough that we can organise around it, flexible enough that we rarely have to resolve what we mean. It travels easily across teams, sectors and disciplines, carrying a sense of agreement with it, even when that agreement is only skin deep.
There are overlaps, of course—threads that connect one interpretation to another—but no single definition that holds them all without distortion.
Different destinations
One way to make sense of this is to shift the question slightly. Instead of asking how innovation happens, we can ask what it is trying to achieve. From that angle, the apparent complexity begins to settle.
Sometimes, the goal is to make existing systems work better—to improve efficiency, reduce cost, or increase speed. Sometimes, it is to generate new economic value, through products, firms, markets or technologies that did not exist before. Sometimes, it is to improve people’s lives more directly, by meeting needs in ways that are more effective, more equitable, or simply more human. And sometimes, the ambition is more structural: to change the system itself, altering the rules, incentives and relationships that shape outcomes over time.
These are not interchangeable aims. They can align, but they can just as easily pull against one another, reflecting the different priorities built into the systems we work within.
The problem of agreement
This is where the difficulty begins. Agreement, it turns out, can be built on shared language without shared meaning.
“We need more innovation” is easy to support. It signals progress, ambition, competence. But it can hold very different intentions at once. A senior leader may be thinking about efficiency, a policy team about growth, a delivery team about service improvement, a systems thinker about structural change.
Everyone agrees, and the work begins, but over time the version of innovation that takes hold is usually the one backed by the strongest incentives, the clearest metrics, or the most institutional power. Often, that means efficiency. Sometimes, economic growth. More rarely, deeper forms of change.
Which is another way of saying that not all forms of innovation are equally possible in all systems.
The quiet politics of innovation
There is a further consequence to this ambiguity. It makes innovation easier to talk about than the changes it often stands in for. Saying “we need to be more innovative” carries a different weight to saying “we need to do more with less”, or “we need to reorganise how this system works”, or “we need to prioritise some outcomes over others”.
The language softens the ask. It creates room for agreement. But it can also obscure what is actually being proposed, and who it serves.
Not all uses of “innovation” are neutral. Some are doing more work than they appear. And in that sense, innovation is not just ambiguous—it is political.
Making meaning visible
None of this is an argument against innovation. But it does suggest a need for greater precision. When we use the word, it is worth asking what kind of change we are actually trying to achieve, for whom, and at whose expense. Without that clarity, it becomes easy to build strategies on the appearance of agreement rather than the substance of it—and that is where many well-intentioned efforts begin to come undone.
It also points to something deeper. If different forms of innovation are enabled—or constrained—by the systems they sit within, then the question is not just what we mean by innovation, but what our systems are designed to produce. That is where the argument turns next.
Innovation is not a single destination. It is a word that allows us to point in several directions at once. The question is whether we are willing to say which one we mean.
