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by SamReidHughes 3867 days ago
> It's big and it's because of them. But it's not because they were innovative in some way.

I think these sentences directly contradict one another. The reason probably has to do with the idea of what it means to be innovative. There is more to innovation than technology. Marketing can be innovative, and so can fine art, political campaigns, movie stuntwork, and business methods.

1 comments

> The reason probably has to do with the idea of what it means to be innovative.

It could be.

Innovative is supposed to mean "featuring new methods/ideas, original". My comment about Uber uses that understanding. But the term has been completely devaluated by marketing now. Seeing what kind of projects get grants under EU's Innovative Economy Programme, "innovation" now means simply doing stuff with the Internet or mobile phones, since they're ~20 years old. You want to build an app? That's innovative. You want to build a website? That's innovative. It doesn't matter that your product is just a clone and does things the same way everyone else have been doing for the past 20 years. It's on-line, therefore innovative.