Innovation Theatre: Shackles to Progress in Agribusiness
What is it, Why it holds back companies and How to overcome It.
Index:
What the Heck is Innovation Theatre?
How to Spot Innovation Theatre
Why is Innovation Theatre Detrimental?
How to Avoid Innovation Theatre
Conclusion
Further Reading
Now more than ever, large agricultural companies have realized that in order to thrive for the long term they need to innovate. However, it’s not always obvious how to do that.
It has become a common practice to resort to “innovation activities” that seem to have worked for other companies or in other industries or to think linearly vs. systematically.
Not all companies were built the same and often practices from other entities don’t address the real barriers for innovation in yours. This is where innovation theatre begins to rear its ugly head without anybody even noticing.
Innovation is hard. Creating the illusion of innovation is easy. I want to go through what Innovation Theatre is, why it shows up and discuss how to overcome it in agribusiness.
What the Heck is Innovation Theatre?
First, we need to understand innovation.
To innovate is defined as:
make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.
Essentially, “new” means innovating. But for innovation to be successful in a corporate context, that’s not enough. It needs to deliver a unique value and be implemented effectively to ever take a business to another level.
What makes corporate innovation so difficult is that it requires a different mindset than the one prevalent in most large organizations. Once an organization is established it creates inertia and efficiency in one direction, it creates a culture of de-risking vs. risk taking and creates accountabilities around specific and predictable revenues, margins, costs, or hurdle rates for capital investments with tons of people in numerous departments (bureaucracy) that create barriers to innovation. (For more on this, Seth Godin has overviewed some of the why behind slowing down innovation).
Some organizations that try to innovate don’t even have the right foundation for it. Usually, the quick and easy solution is to try and adopt what other innovators do. However, if we approach innovation the same way as other organizations, say Google with their famous 20% of time allocation to new projects, it is not feasible for many companies with less resources and misses other aspects of their culture and business that make it work for them.
A quote from economist John Maynard Keynes stands out in this regard:
“Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”
In an effort to create new solutions, organizations will create activities such as accelerator partnerships, innovation departments, establish a corporate venture capital division, launch hackathons and innovation workshops, or incubator challenges. But such activities often don’t deliver tangible results. They do however check boxes in board rooms and annual reviews.
This box checking mentality is what leads to innovation theatre.
Innovation Theatre Defined
Innovation theatre can be any initiative undertaken with the promise of delivering change, that doesn’t create real business impact.
Of course, part of innovating is the fact that some new projects and initiatives fail, but it’s the one’s that fail for specific reasons that are plagued by innovation theatre.
Was it the innovation itself that didn’t work? Or the lack of holistic, systematic thinking to deploy the innovation within the organization?
Was it less successful than anticipated because the innovation was lacklustre or because there wasn’t enough resources invested in? Or lack of follow up process to support the successful implementation?
It can also be a lack of focus. Just like start-ups have to be laser focused on their customer and specific areas of product, incumbents looking to innovate at any level of their organization or across any department have to be focused.
Innovation initiatives aren’t the punch line, they are the starting point for any organization. Having too many balls in the air takes away from any of them being successful.
For true innovation to happen, there is a need to redesign the thinking within the organization and integrate these innovation activities and processes into a cohesive plan. The secret sauce to innovation creating value isn’t technology or ideas themselves, it’s change management.
How to Spot Innovation Theatre?
On the surface, everything can look nice and shiny when practicing innovation theatre— press releases, partnerships with start-ups, individuals with titles that have “innovation” in them or entire investment in new areas of business, such as digital technology for example.
But if you look more carefully the expected outcomes will lag and the internal knowledge will not be growing. For clarity, no one sets out to do innovation theatre, but many still end up doing it, often without them even realizing it.
To avoid innovation theatre, you first need to learn to spot it.
Here are some of the most common signs that point to an organization doing innovation theatre and what I call “box checking behaviour”