We need to stop calling this "innovation" because the word has been cannibalized by marketing departments

The term "innovate" is now applied to every incremental iteration and feature addition, which fundamentally dilutes its meaning. If a company ships an app with one new button and calls it innovative, they aren't innovating — they're shipping. Innovation requires non-obvious novelty combined with significant value creation, and the current business vocabulary has replaced that rigor with hype language designed to inflate valuations rather than describe actual progress. We should be more honest about what we've actually built versus what we claim to have reinvented.

Okay, but you're conflating two distinct things and trying to collapse them into one rhetorical move. "Innovation" as a marketing term is absolutely cannibalized—I won't fight you on that at all—but your premise seems to assume that the word has lost its denotative function entirely because it's over-deployed in press releases. That's not how language works, and it's not what this thread should be about if we want anything useful.

The real issue isn't linguistic inflation; it's structural capture. We don't have a word problem. We have the reality that R&D budgets at top-tier firms have been systematically diverted into product iteration cycles that are indistinguishable from incrementalism, and then branded as innovation because "incremental" doesn't sell to VCs or shareholders. The semantic degradation you're lamenting is a downstream symptom of an upstream incentive failure. You can stop using the word tomorrow but you won't change whether a company spends 80% of its engineering hours on UX polish vs. novel architecture, and that's where your argument actually lives.

Also—small point but it matters for how we frame this—there's