The emperor, as Hans Christian Andersen knew, requires accomplices. Someone must weave the invisible cloth, someone must sell it, and someone must praise the cut of the non-existent suit.
In the modern economy, there are plenty of people willing to do all three. Established practices receive fresh branding, familiar services acquire novel terminology, and everyone pretends something revolutionary has occurred. The result is performative innovation—elaborate theatre that mistakes repackaging for reinvention.
Two ‘new’ features now offered by food delivery platforms spring immediately to mind. Uber Eats has introduced ‘pick up’, allowing customers to order through the app and collect meals directly from restaurants. This saves the delivery fee and, it might be noted, replicates precisely what humanity has called ‘takeaway’ for the past several decades. Not to be outdone, Bolt Food now offers ‘Dine Out’, which enables users to browse restaurant offers. This groundbreaking service is also known as ‘going to a restaurant’, a practice pioneered roughly when restaurants were invented.
Strip away the marketing
The absurdity would be comical if it weren’t taken seriously. These platforms present decades-old consumer behaviour as innovation, complete with product launches, feature announcements, and presumably internal celebrations for ‘shipping’ the ability to… walk into a restaurant. One suspects the next revolutionary feature will be ‘prepare at home’, allowing users to buy ingredients and cook—a concept some might recognise as ‘grocery shopping’. The question is not whether there’s an app for that (there are several). The question is whether there needs to be.
This pattern extends far beyond food delivery. China’s revolutionary ‘trackless trams’ provide a more elaborate—and expensive—example of innovation inflation. Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit (ART), as the system is formally known, arrived with considerable fanfare in 2017. Developed by CRRC, China’s state-owned rolling stock manufacturer, the vehicles began operations in Zhuzhou the following year. Cities from Auckland to Doha studied the technology. Academic papers celebrated its potential. One enthusiast gushed that the system offered “the advantages of modern trams and buses” whilst being “zero-emission and pollution-free”.
Strip away the marketing, however, and one finds a rather long bus. The terminology deserves particular scrutiny. ‘Autonomous Rail Rapid Transit’ manages to mislead on all three counts. The vehicles are not entirely autonomous—they currently require human operators. They have no rail—they run on rubber tyres like buses. And whilst they may be rapid compared to ox carts, they achieve a maximum speed of 70 kilometres per hour, hardly bullet-train territory. The name appears designed to obscure rather than illuminate.
That’s a bus
What CRRC actually invented was optical guidance for articulated buses, and even this wasn’t entirely new. France’s TEOR system in Rouen had been using something similar since 2001, following painted lines with a dashboard-mounted camera. Spain’s Castellón deployed a similar system. These were more accurately called ‘guided buses’ or ‘bus rapid transit’—honest descriptions that didn’t promise capabilities beyond their design.
CRRC’s contribution was to make the buses longer, add railway-style suspension bogies, and rebrand the concept with grander language. This is marketing genius: the same technology that failed to excite as an ‘optically-guided bus’ suddenly attracts international delegations when repackaged as a ‘trackless tram’.
The capacity claims require generous assumptions about human tolerance for crowding. CRRC advertises space for 307 passengers, but this assumes eight people per square metre—the density of a Chinese rush hour. Auckland’s transport authority, conducting due diligence for a proposed line, recalculated the figure using the more realistic standard of four passengers per square metre. The result? A capacity of 170 people, barely more than a conventional articulated bus.
The cost savings prove equally illusory. Proponents claim ART systems cost one-fifth of light rail because they avoid trackwork. Yet researchers in Australia discovered significant road strengthening was required to support the vehicles’ weight. The three-carriage model weighs 51 tonnes when loaded—twice the limit for articulated buses.
Indonesia future capital, Nusantara, ordered an ART vehicle in 2024. After testing from September to October, officials returned the bus to China. The autonomous control system required “manual intervention”. We might reasonably ask why a system called Autonomous Rapid Transit cannot operate autonomously.
Innovations in name only
The common thread between delivery app ‘features’ and ‘trackless trams’ is the substitution of nomenclature for novelty. In both cases, existing practices receive digital interfaces or technical enhancements, then emerge with bold new identities. The underlying service remains unchanged—collecting food, riding buses—but the branding suggests revolutionary advancement. This matters because genuine innovation becomes harder to identify when surrounded by innovations in name only.
The delivery platforms at least offer convenience, even if the convenience involves intermediating transactions that worked perfectly well without apps. Tap a screen rather than telephoning; payment happens automatically rather than at collection. These are genuine, if modest, improvements. The problem arises when platforms present integration of existing services as invention of new ones. ‘Pick up’ and ‘Dine Out’ don’t expand what’s possible; they simply digitise what’s been happening for decades.
With trackless trams, the stakes are higher. Cities invest money in studying technologies that promise transformation but deliver familiar capabilities with shinier packaging. The opportunity cost is real: money and attention diverted to ‘trackless’ systems could fund proper rapid transit or dramatically improved conventional buses.
This pattern reveals something about how innovation is marketed and consumed. Genuinely transformative changes—containerised shipping, mobile telephony, mRNA vaccines—typically require no creative naming. Their utility is self-evident. It’s the marginal improvements and lateral moves that need elaborate branding exercises. When innovation requires an innovation team to explain why it’s innovative, scepticism is warranted.
Progress requires honesty
The incentive structures are clear enough. Technology companies need growth narratives; adding ‘features’ to apps justifies continued investment and user engagement. State manufacturers need sales; rebranding buses as trams expands potential markets. City officials need to demonstrate forward thinking; studying exotic technologies signals sophistication. Everyone benefits from appearing innovative, even when nothing fundamental has changed.
Reinvention, properly understood, means rethinking problems from first principles. It requires questioning assumptions, not merely changing vocabulary. Real innovation in food delivery might involve solving restaurant economics, reducing packaging waste, or creating genuinely new dining formats. Real innovation in urban transport might mean congestion pricing that actually deters driving, or bus networks designed for efficiency rather than political convenience. These are difficult, unglamorous problems. They’re also the ones that matter.
The emperor’s clothes, in Andersen’s tale, vanished when a child stated the obvious. For modern innovation theatre, the obvious has become harder to state as companies and cities invest reputations in their grand pronouncements. But the conclusion remains inescapable: if it has tyres and follows road markings, it’s a bus. If it involves collecting food from a restaurant, it’s takeaway. If it means booking a table, it’s dining out. Call them autonomous, call them features, call them disruption—the terminology doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the offering.
Sometimes reinvention is simply invention wearing a new name tag. And sometimes the most innovative thing we can do is call a bus a bus, a takeaway a takeaway, and refuse to cheer the emperor’s new clothes. Progress requires honesty about what actually constitutes progress. Without it, we risk celebrating increasingly elaborate repackaging whilst genuine transformation waits for attention and resources. That would be the real innovation failure: not the absence of new ideas, but the inability to distinguish them from old ones with better branding.
Photo: Dreamstime.
