Are you innovating? Or performing innovation?

Are you stuck in Innovation Theatre?

Over the years, companies have built an impressive infrastructure around innovation: innovation labs, design thinking workshops, hackathons, digital transformation task forces, idea management platforms, incubators, accelerators and corporate venture funds.

All of these can be valuable.

But there is a catch.

You can have more innovation activity without seeing a corresponding increase in innovation impact.

That is what we call Innovation Theatre: when the visible activity around innovation becomes stronger than the underlying capability to repeatedly turn ideas into results. The PDF illustrates exactly that tension: innovation activity keeps increasing while ROI does not.

The good news is that companies do not need to throw away everything they have built.

The workshops, tools, innovation spaces and processes can all remain useful.

The stage is already there.

What is often missing is what happens backstage: the people, behaviors, capabilities and organizational conditions that allow innovation to work consistently.

Go beyond the Innovation Theatre

In this first visual insight from our Beyond the Innovation Theatre series, we explore the difference between doing innovation activities and building genuine innovation capability.