Icons and Innovation Theater

The other day someone from our fantastic marketing team asked me to write a post for the company. This is nothing new - and writing thought pieces is something I enjoy.

But this request was problematic and I had no choice but to turn down their request. Why?

Because the topic was Innovation Theater.

I understand why they would make the ask. Innovation Theater is something that Mach49 is profoundly opposed to. And it’s a topic that I have spoken passionately about. So asking me to write a piece for Mach49 about the problems with Innovation Theater makes perfect sense.

Except it doesn’t.

To explain, I have to talk a little about Mach49 and in particular our Origin Story, along with our icons.?

Mach49 can be seen as the mutant superhero result of a lab experiment trying to combine DNA from Lean Startup, Design Thinking, and Customer Development.?

As a result, our three icons are Cindy Alvarez, Steve Blank, and David Kelley.

In the three, we believe.

And from the three we inherit our core tenets.?

Our practices are derived from their works. Their texts are where our beliefs come from. And it is from the synthesis of the three, from that unique combination of DNA, that our unique system of methods has been created.

So when our marketing folks asked me to write about Innovation Theater, it was a problem.

Why?

Because the term “Innovation Theater” was coined by one of our very own icons.

Steve Blank created and popularized the term. And Steve Blank wrote the canonical text about the topic.

So who am I to try and recreate or improve upon his work?

Not only has he described the issue better than I ever could, it would be disrespectful and perhaps heretical for me to try to do this.

So instead I’m merely going to share two key quotes from Steve’s piece and provide some color on each from out in the field to explain why this is something so important and visceral for us.

“As companies and agencies get larger, they start to value the importance of “process” over the “product.” And by product, I mean the creation of new hardware, services, software, tools, operations, tradecraft, etc. People who manage processes are not the same people as those who create product. Product people are often messy, hate paperwork, and prefer to spend their time creating stuff rather than documenting it. Over time as organizations grow, they become risk averse. The process people dominate management, and the product people end up reporting to them.”

This is the pain that so many of our clients live every single day. It is the pain that leaves them no choice but to hire someone external to help them. As a former CEO, the above describes my experience so accurately that it makes hair stand up on my arms. As a CEO, I could see the gap between me (the holder of vision and strategy for the entire business) and those working for me (process people, control people, “no” people). I could feel everything slowing to a crawl, no matter how much I pushed.

“...companies and government agencies typically adopt innovation activities (hackathons, design thinking classes, innovation workshops, et al.) that result in innovation theater. These activities shape and build culture, but they don’t win wars, and they rarely deliver shippable/deployable product.”

And this is the logical outcome of the process people dominating corporations. Everything becomes about the activities (process) and the optics (politics). And this, over time, results in bloated “innovation” structures and costs that never result in positive business outcomes. Instead of creating real growth - these theatrical efforts are of course purely performative. And that is why companies largely end up in one of two camps – those who have given up on Innovation as nothing more than a huge PR / employee comms money sink, and those who have to write off all their sunk costs on Innovation and start over with an external collaborator who is opposed to Innovation Theater.

And that is why I’m not writing a piece about Innovation Theater.

And that is why this piece ends here.