Every few years a new CFO discovers that the innovation lab has produced more keynotes than products. The lab is shut down. Its budget is redistributed. A consultancy publishes a satisfied piece about the death of innovation theatre. And then, eighteen months later, a new SVP quietly reopens it under a different name.
It survives because it’s solving a real problem badly, not a fake problem at all. Large organisations need a way to explore ideas that are too small to justify a P&L conversation but too unfamiliar to slot into existing teams. Without somewhere for those ideas to live, they don’t get explored — they get killed by the org chart.
The honest critique of innovation theatre isn’t that it exists, it’s that it’s structurally severed from the rest of the business. Ideas go in, ideas die. The fix isn’t to abolish the lab — it’s to give it a credible mechanism for handing successful experiments off to a team that can actually run them.
Build the bridge before you build the lab. If you can’t describe how an experiment becomes a product, you don’t have an innovation function. You have a hobby.
Alex
