Most big companies think technology when thinking about innovation, regardless of whether or not they’re technology companies. Startups are often considered to be de facto innovators, but is that the case? Marketing tends to have their own way of talking about innovation. Is there any Fortune 500 company that doesn’t talk about their innovation capabilities in their About Us section of their website?
feedback (fēdˈbăkˌ)
n.
The return of a portion of the output of a process or system to the input, especially when used to maintain performance or to control a system or process.
Feedback is not what people think it is. Originally, feedback is an electronic signal received in response to an electronic output. The signal received back can help determine if the outbound signal was “right” or received properly. Today, the term can be applied to non-electronic and non-automated processes, too.
Feedback is good for improving or correcting a process. It’s not good for measuring the impact of the process. Feedback on a product feature, for example, may tell you if it works as expected, but not if the feature contributes to some larger desired outcome. If you want to know about the desired outcome, you have to ask explicitly for that.