TL;DR: Innovation hasn’t died – but it has lost the plot. In a world tangled in crises, awash in tech hype, and drained of clear direction, real innovation feels risky and rare, even unfashionable. The word might get airtime, but the real fire’s gone. If we want it back, we need less noise, more nerve.
One of the things that made innovation so popular as a concept – in academia, among pundits, in the broader business world – was that it was considered something perennial. Whereas other notions and buzzwords waxed and wane, innovation seemed to be one of those few special topics, like leadership, that would never go out of fashion. Yet here we are, in the year 2025, and I can see a distinct cooling off towards the term, even a shying away from the same. Talk to a speaking agency or a commissioning editor, and they will say much the same; the appetite for innovation hasn't died out (and possibly never will), but the red-hot interest simply isn't there anymore. The reasons for this are complex and multi-dimensional, yet they say something about the manner in which innovation exists in the broader business dynamic, and what can at least temporarily make it unfashionable. In fact, this might be a good thing for innovation in the long run, as it would force the evangelists of the topic to think a bit harder about what it is innovation demands, what it can do for us and our organizations, and what is needed for it to flourish.
To understand why there might be a cooling off towards innovation, we need to turn for a moment to what made it so red-hot in the first place. The boom in innovation discourse and associated thinking is directly connected to the immense boom(s) in the world economy that we've experienced during the past 150 years. Now, we could go further back in history than this, but for the purposes of this little essay, I am looking back to something like "the second industrial revolution" (1870 to 1914, approx.) and the many booms that followed (if interspersed by gruesome periods of war). It is no exaggeration to say that the last 150 years have either been times when the economy has grown thanks to technological development, or been in a position where technological development has been very urgent indeed. As these books accelerated, with the "Golden Age of Capitalism" (1948-1973) and the long boom created by the introduction of IT and the internet (about 1982 and onwards), the interest in the power of innovation increased, and increased, and increased. Books about things such as "disruptive innovation" (see this earlier issue on Substack) become massive bestsellers, STEM-educations positioned themselves as the creators of innovators, and innovation itself became considered something akin to a panacea. There may have been some bust-periods where this progression was given something of a dent, but these were often relatively short-term. Somebody like me, a European born in 1972, will thus have lived through mainly times when innovation is hailed as the great dynamic force in the economy, something akin to a secular god, and something always already good and necessary.
Let us now, if only as a thought-exercise, think about our current time. It has been called the time of the "polycrisis", when we've moved away from dealing with discrete crises and instead have to navigate a multitude of the same, all the time. There is no consensus when this "era of the polycrisis" might have started, but most people would agree that when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we were already in it (others have suggested that the many crises in the EU that preceded this would be the real start, but this is of less import here). Currently, we are very much still feeling the impact of a multitude of crises beyond the pandemic: The energy-crunch, high inflation, geopolitical uncertainty stemming not least from Russia's attacks on Ukraine, an ongoing ecological crisis, the many crises like megadroughts and fires this creates, and the still unclear shock to the system that AI represents. A polycrisis indeed!
That said, the world has lived through crises before, even in the period which saw the ascendancy of innovation as our secular divinity. We had two world wars, an oil crisis, and various shifts that might not have been crises but which still shook the world – the fall of the Soviet Union, the rise of neoliberalism, the emergence of China as a major world power, and so on. These all happened, and if anything, they accelerated innovation. What is different today? My theory, and I want to be clear that it is at most the emerging plan of a theory, is that while the aforementioned shifts did shake the world, they did so in ways that were broadly possible to place in existing mental frameworks. The fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of China could both be explained by calls to capitalism; it crushed the former, if ever so slowly, and it turbo-charged the economy of the latter. The oil crisis was in the end a battle about a resource that everyone considered valuable, and while it certainly was surprising, it didn’t appear as an avatar of uncertainty.
Let us compare all that to today. We have a protracted war in Europe, and a highly militarized Israel acting in ways that we assumed were not in the arsenal of modern, Western states. We have a president in the US who has managed to make chaos a viable leadership mode, with the world forced to simply react to one man’s unpredictability. While geopolitics is in uproar, the very biological foundations for humanity are also thrown into disarray and chaos, with storms and heatwaves as merely harbingers of greater shifts. In the world of business, there are several shifts going on at the same time; we are seeing a generational shift, often focused on values and work-ethics, coupled with behavioral shifts, such as the rapid death on in-store shopping, all intermingled with technological shifts, with AI raising questions regarding jobs and professions. In the social sciences we sometimes speak of ‘wicked problems’, which are defined as being so complex that they cannot be solved with any one single solution, and which may be intractable. What happens when the entire world starts looking like a wicked problem?
Now, some have suggested that all this in fact will come together beautifully, insofar as they believe that AI will step in and create not just solutions to our concerns, but innovations such that we have never imagined. In these arguments, which sometimes veer towards the eschatological, it is as if the polycrisis and AI (which obviously existed long before the polycrisis, but where the leap forward represented by generative AI occurred at about the same time as this intensified) emerged at approximately the same time due to some almost divine plan. Yes, they might argue, we are in a pickle, but if we trust and believe in the power of AI, this will be able to spawn the innovations necessary to fix the energy crisis, the demographic crisis, the ecological crisis, the innovation crisis, and (possibly) bring an end to war. It is an attractive story, as messianic ones tend to be (and my invoking of religious themes here is not just a rhetorical flourish), full of promise. Unfortunately, it isn’t really clear that the facts are aligning with the promises, at least not yet. Yes, there are wonderful new AI tools that have already aided in innovation, many of these actually preceding genAI, and science is hard at work trying to derive value from these. This, however, does not mean that the boom in genAI will have any magical impact, if only because these tend to be technologies that aim for the ‘good enough’, the mediocre but functional, and all building solely on historical data. Sure, these tools will help with generating ideas and vibe-coding prototypes, but real innovation still demands quite a lot more than the current form of genAI, even if speeded up ever so much, can really do. It is also quite dangerous to indicate that all we need to do as a society is to wait for AI to get better, after which it will do all the hard work of innovation, as this would also mean that we have to do little to nothing in the here and now. Thus even the promise of a golden age of AI-driven innovation to come might be part and parcel of dimming the innovation lights in the here and now, with us sitting around waiting for our innovation savior. This, however, is to me only a marginal part of the problem. The real issue, to me, lies with the polycrisis, and it is back to this I will now turn.
So, we live in a time with wicked problems, and the world is starting to look like one big, intermingled wicked problem. A key issue here, and do note that this is a mere plan of a theory, might be that in such a context, a central element that drives innovation becomes more difficult to see and thus believe in. I am here speaking of the final goal that one is aiming for, that which Simon Sinek memorably called “the Why?”. As the polycrisis is making it unclear which crisis should be seen as central, it also makes oblique the world into which we are moving. If previous crises were obstacles on a path, the polycrisis is something more akin to a maze, one which is in constant motion. It might not be impossible to solve, somehow, but we are left completely in the dark as to what we're stepping into when we're stepping out of it. Put somewhat differently, we used to have crises where we knew we would end up – both if things went badly and if things went well. Today, we have crises where we don't know if we can handle them, and even in the cases we can, we don't know where we'll end up.
This, to me, is why quite a number of companies, institutions, and people have abandoned innovation as a core dynamic. We used to live in a world where we could trust innovation to take us into if not the promised land, then at least a better land. That certainty has been stripped of us. Now, as the future looks both uncertain and unknowable, why would you focus your energies on something as inherently risky as innovation, particularly the breakthrough kind? Not to mention that AI, which further focuses us on what we already know and the manner in which we can create the 'good enough' at speed and scale, is not as of much help here as its evangelists would have us believe. The scary bit? This is the exact kind of situation in which it would be more important than ever to push for truly radical innovation – rethinking how we live, love, consume, produce, work, play, and exist as a global society. The fact that we have to do this without knowing exactly where we'll end up shouldn't stop us, but invigorate us. Still, this is much easier said than done.
What is required right now, though, is that we accept the situation we're in, and start talking about it without hiding behind vague promises of "AI'll sort it". I have long spoken of an innovation crisis, one where we are spending too much on shallow innovation and not enough on deep such, but the malaise I am seeing now in society is something different. It might best be described as an innovation anxiety, and it has started to paralyze our institutions and our communities. Sure, these are treacherous times, but we cannot let the anxiety we all feel about the future do away with hope, such as the hope that innovation still matters, still can have an impact, and still can build a better world.