Seems to me you're doing an Alice in Wonderland, whereby the word means what you think it means, no more, and no less.

Regardless, I think your example of computational photography actually tends to disprove your point.

IIRC, Google did do HDR computational photography in in the Pixel in 2016... but Apple in turn did Portrait mode, using computational photography in a different way to pull depth information from multiple lenses on the 7 Plus... in that same year.

Which meant that both companies were "innovating" on those technologies well before they were actually introduced. Then later, of course, Google added Portrait mode to the Pixel 3 and Apple added HDR, where both seemingly pulled from one another.

Then again, Light announced the L16 back in 2015, so who really "innovated" on computational photography? And as far as THAT goes, the whole idea of computational photography was a thing back in 2006. There was a whole IEEE conference on it.

True "invention" is an exceedlingly rare beast, which is why most people punt and argue about "innovation" where they can dither back and forth on what really qualifies as "innovative" and what does not.