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Businesses throw around the term “innovation” to show they're on the cutting edge of everything from technology and medicine to snacks and cosmetics. Companies ore touting chief innovation officers, innovation teams, innovation strategies and even innovation days.

But that doesn't mean the companies are actually doing any innovating. Instead, they are using the word to convey monumental change when the progress they're describing is quite ordinary. Like the once ubiquitous buzzwords “synergy” and “optimization”，innovation is in danger of becoming a cliché - if it isn't one already.

“Most companies say they' re innovative in the hope they can somehow con investors into thinking there is growth when there isn’t,” says Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School.

The definition of the term varies widely depending on whom you ask. To Bill Hickey, chief executive of Bubble Wrap ' s maker, Sealed Air Corp., it means inventing a product that has never existed, such as packing material that inflates on delivery.

To Pfizer Inc.'s research and development head, Mikael Dolsten, it is extending a product's scope and application, such as expanding the use of a vaccine for infants that is also effective in older adults.

Scott Berkun, the author of the 2007 book “The Myths of Innovation”, which warms about the dilution of the word, says that what most people call an innovation is usually just a "very good product". He prefers to reserve the word for civilization-changing inventions like electricity, the printing press and the telephone 一 and, more recently, perhaps the iPhone.

Mr. Berkun, now an innovation consultant advises clients to ban the word at their companies. " It is a chameleon-like word to hide the lack of substance/ he says. The word appeals to large companies because it has connotations of being agile and “cool”，“like start-ups and entrepreneurs," he adds.

The innovation trend has given birth to an attendant consulting industry, and Fortune 100 companies pay innovation consultants $300,000 to $1 million for work on a single project, which can amount to $1 million to $10 million a year, estimates Booz&Co. innovation strategy consultant Alex Kandybin.

In addition, four in ten executives say their company now has a chief innovation officer, according to a recent study of the phenomenon released last month by Capgemini Consulting. The findings, based on an online survey of 260 global executives and 25 in-depth interviews, suggest that such titles may be mainly “for appearances”. Most of the executives conceded their companies still don't have a clear innovation strategy to support the role.

As companies have sped up product cycles, the word has come to signify not just doing something new but also doing it more quickly, he says.