Stop requiring innovation heroism!

Rewarding Innovation heroes. Launching accelerators with great fanfare, then not following through. Making big claims about organizational transformation that never amount to anything. It’s all innovation theater and it won’t drive long-term benefits for organizations. A better approach is to make innovation a proficiency, using the principles of discovery driven growth.

We can do better at innovation than Orphans and “Hail Mary” passes

Last week, we wrote about the episodic way in which innovation is managed in most organizations. Or not managed. In fact, it’s innovation theater. Based on Stanford’s Robert Burgelman’s research, we described ways in which innovations can end up being treated like orphans, being the subject of an all-hands drive, being irrelevant or being the subject of a rushed and desperate effort to make something new happen, often in response to some kind of burning platform memo.

As veteran entrepreneur Steve Blank has said forever, when you get to the stage where innovation is seen as a heroic act, that is a clear sign that you have no control over your innovation process. Innovators should not be singled out for their battles royal against the corporation. The financial function of a firm should not be able to dismiss efforts at anything that can’t produce a predictable net present value calculation. Budgets…