On August 7, at the innovation event “Human, innovan las personas, un llamado a la acción sin excusas” (Human: people innovate, a call to action without excuses), organized by ICARE, I came across a detail that made me stop. In one of the opening talks, the acronym I+D+I was projected on screen, with “Innovación” written with a capital letter. I don’t know whether it was a typo or a conscious decision, but I choose to believe the latter: a statement of intent. An almost indirect way of telling us that innovation deserves the same status as its partners in the formula, research and development.
In the Spanish-speaking world, we are used to writing I+D+i, reserving capital letters for Investigación (research) and Desarrollo (development), and relegating innovation to a modest lowercase letter. In English, by contrast, the equivalent formula is R&D&I —Research, Development and Innovation—, where all the initials are capitalized. It may seem like an insignificant detail, a mere graphic formality, but form matters. A lot.
In communication, symbols are not neutral. Typography, position and even punctuation convey implicit messages. With a lowercase “i”, innovation seems subordinate, as if it were a nice but secondary appendix to the true protagonists: research and development. Capitalizing it, on the other hand, acknowledges its equal standing, a shared responsibility in the chain that runs from knowledge to impact.
I know there are linguistic and normative explanations. In Spanish, the lowercase letter has been justified on the grounds that “innovation” is not a field of knowledge in itself, but a process or outcome derived from the other two. There are also historical reasons: the acronym I+D became established in public policy and official documents decades before innovation was incorporated as a key concept, and when the “i” was added, it was placed that way, almost like a footnote.
But times have changed. Today we know that researching and developing is not enough if we are unable to turn those results into value for society, the economy or the environment. Innovation is not an “afterward”; it is an “alongside”. It is an integral part of the impact-generation cycle. And if English reflects this naturally with three capital letters, in Spanish we still carry an inertia that, perhaps unintentionally, perpetuates a mental hierarchy.
This is where ICARE’s choice, intentional or not, becomes suggestive. Writing I+D+I breaks that inherited structure and sends a symbolic message: innovation is on the same level, with the same visual and conceptual weight as research and development. And if the way we write influences the way we think, perhaps it is worth rethinking our acronyms.
This is not a typographic crusade, but an invitation to reflect on how we value innovation. In a global context where countries compete not only to generate knowledge but to apply and scale it, putting innovation on an equal footing is not a whim: it is a statement of strategy.
So the next time I see a lowercase “i” at the end of the formula, I will remember that we can choose —as in that ICARE talk— to capitalize it. Not out of grammatical rebellion, but because recognizing innovation as a protagonist means recognizing that, without it, research and development remain incomplete.
Javier Ramírez
Executive Director, Know Hub Chile
Read the original column at https://comentarista.emol.com/2230711/34473822/Javier-Ramirez.html
