“Are You Engaging in Innovation Theater?”

That’s the title of this article by Mike Shipulski on Braden Kelley’s Innovation website.

It’s worth a read if you are involved in innovation efforts in any domain.

It hit the nail on the head with my experience with mature companies that do things that fool people into think the company is innovating.

Many folks engaged in this innovation theater aren’t aware of it. They are like characters in a play that don’t realize they are fictional characters in a play and will reject the notion.

This is a good taste from the article:

If a return on investment (ROI) calculation is the gating criterion before starting an amazing project, that’s innovation theater. Projects that could create a new product family with a fundamentally different value proposition for a whole new customer segment cannot be assigned an ROI because no one has experience in this new domain. Any ROI will be a guess and that’s why innovation is governed by judgment and not ROI. Innovation is unpredictable which makes an ROI is impossible to predict. And if your innovation process squeezes judgment out of the story-line, that’s a tell-tale sign of innovation theater.

If the specifications are fixed, the resources are fixed, and the completion date is fixed, that’s innovation theater. Since it can be innovation only when there’s novelty, and since novelty comes with uncertainty, without flexibility in specs, resources, or time, it’s innovation theater.

If a steering team is involved, it’s innovation theater. Consensus cannot spawn innovation.

Mike Shipulski, “are you engaging in innovation theater?”

Characters in the play will scoff at the notion that using ROI as a gating criterion is fruitless because innovation is unpredictable. They cannot imagine any other way of doing it. They are linear thinkers who have been told all their life that they are smart because they can solve linear problems really well — like acing tests by studying more.

If you suggest that ROI is unpredictable, they will think you don’t know how things work or that you might be little crazy. They can’t imagine any other way. How can leaders decide which ideas to work on if ROI is unpredictable?

They miss the blindingly obvious reason why predicting ROI doesn’t work. If it did, then the company should have a steady pipeline of innovation successes and the folks predicting ROI of new ideas should be making a lot of money. If not, they’d probably figure out real quick that they should leave and start their own VC firm.

So if predicting ROI doesn’t work, what does? It’s not a big secret. Many highly innovative companies and startups use it.

I saw it for the first time when we presented a new CEO of a mature company with a slate of new ideas for the next year so he could pick the 2-3 he wanted us to work on, (as if he had the secret ROI calculator to predict winners), like we had done with previous CEOs (who thought it was their job to predict winners).

He said, “How am I supposed to know? Why can’t you try them all, even if in small ways, to see which ones have the most promise?”

We did and we had the most innovative time in my career for the next few years, resulting in a culture that I’ve been trying to recreate since, without success, because the characters in the innovation theater don’t realize they are reciting lines of a play.