When Innovation Becomes a Buzzword
The word innovation is used so often that it has started to lose its meaning. Companies build teams around it, strategies depend on it, and yet few people can clearly explain what actually changes when innovation happens. At some point, the word stopped being a useful concept and became a label.
I’ve always been drawn to the question of how things could work better. It began in architecture, sketching buildings, rethinking how people move, meet, and create together. Over time, that same curiosity shifted from physical spaces to systems, teams, and decisions. I began to realise that innovation isn’t defined by what we build, but by how we think while building.
I’ve seen organisations set up “innovation teams” with genuine energy, only to bury them under process and politics. Creativity is treated as a special project rather than a way of operating. Innovation becomes something separate from everyday work, instead of embedded within it. And yet, we keep using the word because it points to something real: the drive to progress, to imagine what could be better.
From a designer’s perspective, innovation is a translation process. It happens when curiosity meets constraint, when ideas are tested, shaped, and refined until they create real value for someone. Designers work this way instinctively: prototype, learn, adjust, repeat. The same rhythm applies beyond design, into business, leadership, and decision-making. In that sense, innovation is design applied to systems, not just products.
In my work leading real estate strategy and innovation, I’ve seen this pattern repeatedly. A small change in how teams collaborate can unlock more progress than a large redesign. A well-framed question can shift an entire project’s direction. Innovation rarely starts with technology. It starts with attention to what isn’t working, and to what might work better.
That belief eventually became the seed for WIREFRAMES : a space to document and explore how design, business, and strategy evolve together. Not as a department or a slogan, but as an ongoing conversation between imagination and reality. Innovation, in this sense, grows through asking better questions, experimenting in small ways, and building systems that help ideas survive rather than fade.
Innovation isn’t about being first. It’s about being attuned to what’s shifting, to what no longer works, and to what might be possible next. Without that attention, innovation becomes just another word we use instead of a practice we sustain.
