Innovation theatre is the busiest room in the building

The trophy photograph goes up on Friday. Matching shirts, a judge from the executive team, a slide with a hopeful name. On Monday the winning idea needs a budget line that already belongs to someone else, and a path into a product the sales force already knows how to sell.

Activities, then a customer

Steve Blank was asked, in a conversation with Philip Bouchard, about the programmes large companies keep funding. Idea challenges. Accelerators that invite startups in. Incubators and makers' spaces. A lot of money goes into that set. His answer is that this is innovation theatre. The programmes are activities. You can run them and still have nothing a customer can buy.

The hard part, in his account, is the demo's aftermath, and the internal accelerator's aftermath. Something has to be delivered all the way through the sales channel the company already runs. From the showcase into the engineering group, then out as a product those sellers can actually sell. That is where the objections live, and he lists them the way a sponsor hears them. This is not on our budget or our schedule. This conflicts with the existing product line. This would put our most profitable product out of business. We do not have a sales force that knows how to sell this.

A good number of companies, he says, stay on the easy sentence. Let's have an incubator. Let's have an accelerator. Delivery with any speed is the hard sentence. When he teaches the same material for government, the standard is innovation that gets deployed and fielded. A demo can still be how you convince someone to release funds. Companies, in his line, already have more demos than they will ever need. The successful programme is the one that works out how to deploy, by getting through what he calls the political wiring. Who owns the work. How it differs from what the company already has. Which budget it comes from. The work is unscheduled. It may miss a quality bar written for the current product. It may worry the people who protect the brand. Those problems can be solved. Another showcase does not solve them.

A hackathon and an internal lab sit in that same family. The name on the door changes. The Friday photograph stays. If the photograph is what the organisation knows how to produce, the activity has a catering budget and the name of a pipeline.

After the show

Blank reaches for an old movie habit to describe the easy version. Someone says let's put on a show, the way they did in the Andy Hardy films, and then the show exists. The useful question is what happens after the applause. His answer is that companies lack a corporate innovation doctrine: a shared account of how an idea is allowed to move, where it is allowed to go, and who is allowed to spend to get it there.

I would put that account on one page before the next lab tour is booked. The page has to name an owner inside the line of business, a budget that can carry the work, and a path into the engineering group and the sales organisation that already face the customer. If those three are missing, the tour is the output. The intranet post is the evidence. The idea goes back into a slide called pipeline and waits for a sponsor who was never in the room.

He is frank about why the current machine resists the page. The processes and procedures that make a large company good at its present business will strangle a new offer if the offer has to use them unchanged. Innovation, in his requirement, needs a parallel set of processes on a faster track, with permission, while the processes that keep the existing business honest stay where they are. Without that permission, every new idea is a trespasser on someone else's schedule.

There is a split in attention he states bluntly. In a large company, he says, 99 percent of the people are executing the current business model. A very small share are there to innovate. A startup points the whole company at the new thing, and a win can pay the people who took the risk. Inside the large company the personal payoff for a new offer is nothing like that. The scoreboard people are paid on still belongs to the current model, until a senior owner changes it for the few people on the new work.

Chief executives, in his picture, are often the wrong craft for that change even when they want it. He describes the person running a 10,000-person company. The skill that got them there is execution. Innovation gets a nod in the strategy offsite. Activist investors who want the company taken apart, and a calendar already full of the current business, compete for the same hours. A pipeline with no one senior enough to protect the fast track gets pulled back into ordinary process.

Large companies also have doors a startup does not. They can build, they can buy, they can partner and they can license. Blank's point is that startups mostly have the first door. A company that only builds, inside a lab sealed off from the other three, has chosen the hardest route and then staffed it with people who cannot open the building.

The pipeline, end to end

What he wants has a name. An innovation pipeline that runs from the source of an idea to the moment it is in a user's hands. An incubator and an accelerator are a single point on that line.

The sequence he describes is plain enough to copy onto a wall. First, where the idea or the technology comes from. Inside the company, from an acquisition, from a university. Second, problem curation: what problem is this solving, and is it a real problem or a neat piece of flashy technology? Third, a way to prioritise what is actually in the pipeline, because a company that lets every idea stay is not choosing. Fourth, testing solutions and hypotheses. In the middle of the pipeline he puts the customer discovery and validation method he teaches as the Lean LaunchPad and as I-Corps. Fifth, incubation, once you have a reason to keep going. Sixth, the step the showcase skips: transition and integration with the existing engineering and sales organisations, so the thing is delivered to a customer.

The team has to change as the idea moves. At the start you may have an innovator, often a technologist in research, and that person is the right one for the invention. Innovators invent. Getting the invention across the finish line inside a bureaucracy is a different job, done by someone Blank would call an entrepreneur inside the company: a person who knows which meeting can stop a project, which budget can carry it and which standard can be waived without wrecking the brand. The common mistake is to teach the innovator the finisher's job and hope the lesson sticks. He thinks you can help an inventor appreciate what the finisher does. They remain different people. A lab staffed only with inventors will keep producing work that stops at the demonstration, however good the demonstration is.

He has a name for the pattern companies prefer to remember. Heroic innovation. There was no path, and someone still got a product out, and the story gets told at the offsite. Celebrating the hero skips the more useful reading. The missing path is the problem. The hero is what you get when the path is a person. A pipeline is how you stop depending on whoever was stubborn enough this year.

W.L. Gore is the company he offers as a picture of the other pattern. A private firm that took one material, expanded PTFE, past GORE-TEX fabrics and into medical products, filtration, fibres and cables. Leadership there treated continual innovation as the goal, and a process carried new offers past the first working version. Most programmes have the working version. Few have the carry.

A page before the next showcase

If you sponsor a lab, a hackathon, an accelerator or an idea challenge, the next review can ask for a different pack. The activity can stay on the calendar. It stops being the result.

1. Name the deliverable in a customer's hands. If the only artefact you can point at is a demo, a trophy or a cohort photo, you have not named it yet.
2. Draw the path from that demo into the engineering group and the existing sales channel. Mark the owner, the budget and the current product it might displace.
3. Run problem curation before you fall in love with the technology. If you cannot say whose problem it is, it does not enter the pipeline.
4. Put customer discovery in the middle, before incubation. A hypothesis you have not taken to a real customer is still a pitch deck.
5. Name the person inside the company who can cross the bureaucracy, and keep that name off the list of inventors you hope will grow into the job.
6. Write the parallel process the fast track is allowed to use, and name the senior owner who can stop ordinary process from swallowing it when the quarter gets tight.
7. Decide whether this should be built, bought, partnered or licensed. A lab that can only build has one door, and it is the crowded one.

Collective Campus builds high-performance teams for the AI world. Our lean startup and product sprint workshop is where a team takes one live idea through problem framing, a thin test and a decision, with the owner in the room. The pipeline still has to exist when they get back to their desks. The workshop is the middle of the pipeline, practised on something the company might actually sell.

Blank's question is the one I would tape above the lab door. Did this leave through the channel that already sells, and is it now in a user's hands, or did it leave as a photograph? The next showcase will produce another photograph. The wiring is the work that makes the photograph worth taking.