I happen to believe that there is no ‘I’ in innovation. Webster differs with me.  People with small minds believe there is only one way to spell a word—when you have a blog, you can spell words however you want.

Those same non-believers say, ‘There is no ‘I’ in team. There is, however, a ‘me’ if you use the ‘m’ and the ‘e’.

One of the commercials on television is the guy who claims to have invented the ‘untucked shirt.”  My children invented ‘untucked shirts’ well before the Untucked-Shirt-Guy laid claim to inventing them.  Everyone one who has worn a shirt figured out how to wear the shirt without tucking it into their pants. Mr. Untuck did not invent or innovate anything.

Untucked shirts are no more innovative than charging people for a bottle of water.

People and firms, that claim to be innovative, those of the great unwashed, the bourgeoisie, have little understanding of what constitutes innovation.

Nobody invented untucked shirts.

Likewise, nobody invented customer experience.

Customer experience has been around since the time a caveman bartered a fish with another caveman for a Sony Walkman.  Their experiences were either good or they were not.

Customer experience has declined ever since.  It has become so poor that we are pleased even when we have a marginal experience.  We are grateful simply because the experience wasn’t worse.  We have been trained to feel like firms are doing us a favor for simply doing what we ask of them.

What customer experience has in common with untucked shirts is that neither were invented and neither have been innovated.