Whither "Innovation"?

I have a real thing about the word "innovation". In one place I worked it was a massive management buzzword that got bandied about so much that it lost all meaning and caused one of my fellow co-workers to make the insightful point that no-one ever wants un-innovative things, so why bother pointing out the whole time that we ought to be striving for it when that should be bloody obvious. It is therefore unsurprising that I didn't react brilliantly to Michael Barnes' last Gameshark piece about creativity in boardgaming design, in which the word innovation and derivates thereof are used no less than 13 times, if you include the introduction. But in truth it wasn't just lexical pedantry that put me off - I disagree with much of what was said in that piece, so I'm going to abuse my own space on F:AT to offer some counter arguments. But before I do I'm off to fetch a thesaurus so that I can look up some alternatives to the dreaded "I" word.