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Practicing what I preach: Innovation abuse

For kicks, and to help practice what i preach, I’ve been tracking the use of the word innovation in the CNBC Business of Innovation series. It’s not good. In fact it’s embarrassing. Part of the problem is the word Innovation appears in the title, which means the I-word gets used at least 6 or 7 times per episode for that alone. And since episode 2 was titled “Innovate or die”, the count jumped again.

Anyway, here’s my count so far. I included all variants (innovative, innovator, innovation, etc.):

Episode 1: 79
Episode 2: 110

Ouch.

A few of the experts chatted backstage during the taping of the first episode about this problem, and we mentioned it to the producers, but it doesn’t appear to have made much of a difference. For a 45 minute show, 72 means 1.6 uses of the i-word per minute. 110 = 2.45 per minute. Wow. If any word gets used that often its a good sign folks aren’t being as clear as they should be.