I attended an Innovation awards event tonight where "innovations" included efficiency improvements, scaling sales of existing products and purchasing more companies for portfolios. Defining innovation as wow factors, these are not innovations. They are more along the business as usual ends of the continuum.
It's a call for changing standards leaning more in the direction of the definition I prefer: That which surprises the imagination of the market. At the higher end of the spectrum are always things markets do not imagine, do not demand, do not anticipate. They actually create new markets.
Let's provoke companies in these directions and celebrate these kinds of innovations.