Last month, the usual October industry event took place. I won’t name it—you know which one. While scrolling through LinkedIn comments, I came across a colleague’s summary of the day: “Nice event, but not much innovation.”
Now, I get it. Really. I’ve spent years talking about tech, AI, hypothetical futures, and decentralized utopias. But here, a distinction is overdue.
Etymologically, innovation comes from to innovate, “to make new.” Fair enough. But the deeper meaning is more unsettling: to innovate is to disrupt the established order. And that’s where things get tricky.
Because in hospitality, do we really need to disrupt everything? Or do we simply need to do things better?
What my colleague calls “a lack of innovation” is, on closer inspection, just the absence of fireworks. But innovation isn’t fireworks. It’s boring. Quiet. Incremental. It is never (and I mean never) a re-volution. It’s always an e-volution—very much in the Kurzweilian sense of the word.
The real issue is something else entirely: we’ve convinced ourselves that relevance requires constant amazement. But sometimes we don’t need a new tool—we just need to learn how to use the ones we already have properly.
So no, the event wasn’t poor. Maybe what we don’t need is another “game changer,” but professionals who understand the rules of the game and know how to play it well.
Because chasing novelty for its own sake, without knowing what to do with it, is self-indulgence. And if even we—the ones who are supposed to lead this industry—keep complaining about the lack of “innovation,” then maybe the problem isn’t the event.
Maybe it’s us.
See you next week,
Simone
SIMONE PUORTO
