Dropping the Curtain on Innovation Theatre

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 coders played beat-the-clock and one another to come up with ideas for new products and businesses. Dozens of multinational corporations have established “labs” in the Silicon Valley corridor, presumably so that they can be closer to the source of breakthrough technologies. Millions of dollars are spent each year on design thinking workshops, technology conferences, and venture capital demo days in hopes that a brilliant idea or shiny new product will emerge from these practices.

Like kabuki itself, these highly stylized programs give off impressive energy, but as Blank argues, they are play-acting at innovation. They may be entertaining, even thought-provoking, but like a play, they aren’t real. They are ethereal. To his way of thinking, organizations would do well to shut down the show. 

On the surface, Blank is right. No company should invest in activities that distract from real value creation, no matter how enjoyable the performance. As theatergoers, we’re merely observers, absorbing the story. Observation is not innovation. 

Yet theater - like innovation - is far more complex than the performance on stage. And therein lies our inspiration. You see, many of the most innovative ideas take inspiration from another idea, turning it over to find a new perspective. Where Steve Blank found theater to be a metaphor for value-less innovation, we find a model for the complex, talent-rich, business-savvy, and creative processes that make not just a great theatrical production but a successful innovation strategy. You see, behind the orchestra seats, costumes, and special effects of innovation theater, there is a complex and well-practiced craft. So, forget just observing the performance; it is in these behind-the-scenes efforts that lead to true innovation.

Staging A Midsummer Night’s Dream

It’s understandable, of course, that business leaders would want a clear script from which to build an innovation strategy. Follow the stage directions, read the lines, and await the applause. If only innovation - and theater -  were that easy.

Consider three productions of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One, put on by a college acting class, entertained an audience quick to forgive the amateur backdrops and occasional fumbled line. Another, produced by a local theater company, was a literal romp through the woods as the audience followed actors through a California Redwood forest. Then, there is the Royal Shakespeare Company, which has interpreted this venerable comedy in various productions for 100 years. Had each theater company stuck to the script, there would be little reason to take in the performances. You’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. Instead, producers, directors, actors, makeup artists, lighting technicians, costume and set designers, musicians, theater managers, and presumably even a park ranger got in on the act, creating inventive interpretations of the 400-year-old script.

And so it is with innovation. We may not fully understand what goes into any specific innovative production. Value-creating innovation, just like really good theater, is hard and complicated. It might be dramatically scripted or totally improvised, and in every case, it takes a company of people with wide-ranging competencies working in collaboration to make it happen.

The good news is that these competencies can be measured, and they can be learned.

For more than 30 years, we have lived close to the bone with some of the world’s most innovative companies. We’ve worked on teams to bring remarkable new products to market. We’ve mentored startups that have gone on to create game-changing technologies and watched once-promising companies implode. More than once, we’ve been there to jump start stalled development efforts or pick up the pieces when high-stakes venture initiatives failed to deliver.

Was it the resources of a Fortune 100 company that made the difference? Perhaps it was a visionary CEO or a brilliant young entrepreneur who saw an opportunity everyone else had missed.  Did market timing make - or break - a new initiative? Maybe a team just got lucky. 

A little bit of all of that can make the difference between a successful innovation strategy and a failed product launch, to be sure. It's easy in retrospect to paint success or failure with a broad brush, giving so-called genius or bad luck too much credit for the outcome of any initiative. Yet, we tend to fall into that trap because so much of what makes an innovation initiative a failure or success is actually intangible. 

What’s Blocking Your Innovation Strategy?

Innovation initiatives succeed for many and varying factors, but they tend to fail for the same handful of reasons. We call these blockers. 

Some blockers are easily identified: a budget shortfall, the departure of key personnel, a sudden shift in market demand, poor product design, or an abrupt about-face in the C-suite. These tangible blockers are very real, easily identified, and often blamed for an initiative’s failure. Yet these blockers account for only a fraction of ineffectual innovation strategies.2

Faulting easily identifiable, tangible blockers as the cause of organizational innovation stagnation is a bit like citing a heart attack as the cause of death without noting years of cigarette smoking, obesity, and high-stress work. The heart attack might have been the ultimate trigger, but the underlying conditions set the stage. 

Indeed, it’s what you can’t easily see that will kill your innovation strategy.

Organizational structure and culture, leadership engagement, decision-making process and authority, interdepartmental cooperation and collaboration, and misaligned vision and values. These underlying blockers may not be obvious at first glance, but they have an outsized impact on your company’s growth strategy. Identifying these blockers, then, is essential to every innovation initiative.

Consider Shakespeare again. Imagine if we were to reinterpret A Midsummer Night’s Dream and set it in, say, Brooklyn, rather than a sylvan glen.  I’m going to want a director who has found critical success with this sort of experimental production, and I might want to cast a hip hop artist in the role of Puck. I’m definitely going to need a costume designer who is as comfortable with streetwear as with Elizabethan garb. 

In this scenario - like every innovation initiative ever - context drives decision making and sets requirements. And that’s why innovation can be so difficult; we imagine innovation as a magical exercise that leads to spectacular breakthroughs. By imbuing innovation, conceptually, with so much opaque power, we miss - and even create - the blockers to success.

C\R Strategies works with transformational leaders raise innovation performance by identifying signals faster, aligning teams and capital, and building sustainable, repeatable capabilities. To learn more, follow us on LinkedIn

References:

1 Blank, Steve, October 7, 2019, “Why Companies Do ‘Innovation Theater’ Instead of Actual Innovation”, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2019/10/why-companies-do-innovation-theater-instead-of-actual-innovation

2 Scott Kirsner, July 30, 2018. “The Biggest Obstacles to Innovation in Large Companies”, Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/07/the-biggest-obstacles-to-innovation-in-large-companies