INSIGHTS

Across America and around the world, a Kabuki theater of a sort is playing out in corporations large and small, established and new. It’s called innovation. Startup guru  Steve Blank  first described this “innovation theater”, as he called it, as the flurry of activities that allow organizations to believe they are making great progress but that, in reality, rarely deliver new value.1 It has become fashionable for companies to host hackathons where entrepreneurially-minded co

More than $215 billion is lost to innovation projects annually.1 In 2023, failed startups erased $27 billion from venture capital balance sheets.2  Mergers and acquisitions fail way more often than they succeed, 3 evaporating billions in value each year. Despite the vast amounts invested - more than half a trillion a year- strategies meant to drive innovation often collapse under their own weight. No one intends for innovation strategies to derail, and yet they do. With alarm