Innovation means the application of ideas that are novel and useful.
Creativity, the ability to generate novel and useful ideas, is the seed of innovation but unless it’s applied and scaled it’s still just an idea.
Innovation must lead to the introduction of new products and services that add value to your organisation and your clients.
Innovations can be big or small, but breakthrough or disruptive innovation is something that either creates a new category, or changes an existing one dramatically, and obsoletes the existing market leader.
So we need to stop calling everything breakthrough or disruptive, especially in internal company discussions. It is more than OK to have a balanced pipeline of big and small ideas, and we need to get comfortable with that again.
If we demand nothing but disruption or breakthrough, (delivered tomorrow and on small budgets) then that is all people want to work on, and to accommodate this, everything gets labeled in those terms.
But language matters, and once we start calling good but smaller ideas breakthrough, we lower the bar.
This is a recipe for mediocrity, and is one of the reasons why so many companies struggle with too many small initiatives and not enough big ones.
In a nutshell: It is important to have a balanced pipeline of big and small ideas, and we need to get comfortable with that again.