The rhetorical mask of innovation

How a single word lets us claim progress before we prove it

What is innovation? We hear this word used constantly, particularly in the creative, technology, healthcare, and education sectors. Companies advertise innovative products, hospitals implement innovative care models, and universities promote innovative programs — the word has become so ubiquitous that almost nobody stops to ask who benefits from that ubiquity.

According to Merriam-Webster, innovation is defined simply as a new idea, method, or device. On the surface, this definition seems reasonable, but the deeper implication is that it places all of its emphasis entirely on novelty. If an artifact or a process is new, it can be labeled innovative regardless of whether it actually improves anything.

This linguistic ambiguity creates a systemic problem. A technology company can introduce a fundamentally new way of interacting with a digital product and call it innovative, even if the redesign makes the user experience significantly worse. A university can overhaul its curriculum and market it as innovative years before any evidence exists to show that students are learning more effectively. In far too many cases, innovation becomes little more than change whose benefits are presumed rather than demonstrated.

When we hear that a system or product is innovative, we instinctively assume something much greater than mere novelty. We assume that the change creates genuine value, improves human outcomes, and moves society forward.

This assumption reveals an important distinction between innovation and progress. Innovation simply describes the introduction of something new. Progress, by contrast, is our judgment that a particular change ultimately made things better. The two concepts are closely related, but they are not synonymous.

The distinction is important because the positive associations attached to progress are often transferred onto innovation long before any evidence exists to justify them. A new idea, process, or technology can be innovative the moment it is introduced. Whether it represents genuine progress may not become clear for years, decades, or even generations.

History is filled with monumental innovations whose long-term consequences remain deeply contested. Antibiotics revolutionized medicine and saved countless millions of lives, yet their widespread and undisciplined use has contributed to the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Similarly, smartphones fundamentally transformed global communication, commerce, and access to information, yet they have also been linked to psychological distraction, behavioral addiction, and sharply declining attention spans.

Not every innovation, however, requires decades of debate to evaluate. Some reveal their shortcomings almost immediately. The Reliant Robin — the three-wheeled British microcar of the 1970s — was marketed as an innovative solution to rising fuel costs, ownership expenses, and manufacturing constraints. It was novel, it was inexpensive, and it had a well-documented tendency to roll over during sharp turns. The company moved on while drivers were left to deal with the consequences.

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The Robin illustrates a simple but important point: novelty alone does not guarantee improvement. A solution can be innovative in its design and still fail to represent meaningful progress for the people expected to use it. The Robin is perhaps the most straightforward example in this collection — few people would argue that a car prone to tipping over on corners represents progress. Antibiotics and smartphones, however, resist such easy judgments. Both fundamentally expanded human capabilities and transformed society, yet both also produced consequences that remain contested. They are clearly innovative, but whether they constitute unambiguous human progress is a more complicated question.

The Rhetorical Power of Innovation

The more pressing question may not be what innovation actually means, but rather how the word is deployed as a tool of persuasion.

Innovation occupies a unique, highly protected position in modern language. Unlike descriptive words such as effective, beneficial, or successful — all of which require immediate empirical evidence to be persuasive — the word innovation requires almost no data to achieve its effect. The moment a project or product is described as innovative, it automatically inherits many of the positive associations we normally reserve for proven, long-term success. It sounds intelligent, forward-thinking, and inherently valuable long before any of those qualities have actually been established.

This creates a subtle, highly effective rhetorical advantage for institutions. Organizations can present radical change as evidence of improvement without ever demonstrating that any real improvement has occurred — and when outcomes disappoint, the language of innovation provides a ready-made defense. It was an experiment, disruption takes time, and iteration is part of the process. The word doesn’t just describe change—it insulates the people driving it from the consequences of getting it wrong. In this sense, innovation functions almost like an unbacked promise, suggesting that value will emerge at some point in the future, even when that value remains completely unproven in the present. Sometimes that promise is fulfilled, and sometimes it is not, yet the language of innovation always arrives long before the evidence.

Artificial Intelligence and the Progress Assumption

Artificial intelligence currently stands as the clearest and most pressing example of this rhetorical phenomenon. Few would argue that generative AI is not innovative — it has introduced computational capabilities that were previously unimaginable.

Yet, because the technology has been wrapped in the protective language of innovation, many of its creators have been granted extraordinary freedom to deploy societal-scale systems before legal, ethical, and regulatory frameworks have had time to catch up.

In almost any other industry, releasing a physical product that frequently malfunctions, hallucinates its own facts, and infringes on intellectual property rights would result in immediate regulatory recalls or product liability lawsuits. But in the tech ecosystem, this exact scenario is shielded by a specialized vocabulary.

When a flawed AI model is pushed out to millions of users, it is rarely called what it is — an unfinished, unstable product. Instead, it is framed as a “minimum viable product.” When the system fails spectacularly or outputs dangerous misinformation, developers and tech executives shrug it off with a classic bit of industry jargon — “it’s a feature, not a bug.” By declaring that the friction is simply part of the architecture, the language of innovation transforms a failure into an intentional choice.

By framing these multi-billion-dollar corporate deployments as mere “institutional experiments,” tech companies successfully shift the burden of risk. The public is transformed from consumers into involuntary beta testers, tasked with sorting through the downstream societal friction while the creators claim the financial rewards of progress.

What makes artificial intelligence particularly fascinating is that its wildest promises and its most severe systemic risks are occurring at the exact same time. It may ultimately become one of the most profoundly disruptive innovations in human history.

The greater concern, however, may not be the behavior of technology companies alone. Universities are integrating AI into education, hospitals are exploring AI-assisted care, governments are experimenting with AI-driven decision systems, and corporations are embedding AI into everyday workflows. In many cases, the technology is being adopted not because its benefits have been conclusively demonstrated, but because its innovative status creates an assumption that adoption itself represents progress.

By treating the word “innovative” as a moral pass rather than an unproven hypothesis, we allow the speed of execution to outrun human judgment — validating the change long before we have any proof that it represents progress.

Innovation as Hypothesis

Perhaps the solution is not to abandon the language of innovation, but to treat it with greater humility. Rather than viewing innovation as evidence of success, we should view it as a hypothesis awaiting validation. An innovation is, at its core, a claim that a particular change will improve some aspect of the human experience. Whether that claim proves true remains an open question until sufficient evidence exists to evaluate it.

This perspective shifts the conversation away from novelty and toward outcomes. Instead of asking whether something is innovative, we might ask whether it is effective, sustainable, beneficial, or capable of solving the problem it was designed to address. Innovation may initiate the conversation, but it should not end it.

Human civilization depends upon experimentation, creativity, and the pursuit of new ideas. Many innovations ultimately become progress. Others reveal unforeseen costs. Most become some complicated combination of both. The challenge is not determining whether a change is innovative, but whether the promises attached to that change withstand the scrutiny of evidence and time.

Innovation tells us that something has changed. Progress tells us whether that change was worthwhile. The mistake is assuming that the first automatically guarantees the second.

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The rhetorical mask of innovation was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.