Innovation?

I've been going back and forth between a lot of people and talking to them about my prospective research topic, and it kept coming back to a question of relevance. Sure, it's a fascinating research topic, but its use to anybody other than myself is negligible. I've thus decided to move up one layer of abstraction on what I was actually doing.

So, what was I doing? I had this idea that time could be used in fascinating ways for game design. And after I had developed some mechanics that could work, I came across a game that was already using them: Braid. This 2D platform game by Jon Blow uses most of the reverse time & doubling yourself mechanics that I had thusfar come up with.

Here's a video of a very interesting lecture by Jon Blow

So, back to what I was doing. Simply put, I was trying to do something new and I wanted to find out a way that I could somehow structure that process. The process of figuring out what to do that was new. Of course I have a pretty clear direction of what I want, which is "something to do with time". However, the question of how to structure such an idea into a process to come up with something new is a lot more interesting.

As far as relevance goes, there are a lot of questions surrounding this new buzzword "innovation". First of all, what is innovation? And secondly, is that anywhere near what we imply when we use it as a buzzword?