Innovation is one of the most overused words in corporate life. Every company claims to be innovative. Many have labs, incubators, hackathons and glossy slide decks. Yet when you ask what has actually changed for customers or for the core business, the answers are often thin.
That gap between appearance and reality is what I call Innovation Theatre.
Innovation Theatre is easy to spot once you know what to look for. There are plenty of pilots but very few scaled solutions. The same ideas reappear every year in slightly updated packaging. Teams spend more time on branding, naming and storytelling than on adoption and integration. Executives visit the lab, take photos, share them on internal channels, then return to business as usual.
On the surface, the organisation looks busy and creative. Underneath, very little risk has been taken and very few decisions have changed.
Several forces push organisations towards theatre. Safety is one. Small, isolated tests are easier to sell than real changes to core processes. Optics is another. It is more impressive to show a polished demo than to explain a three-year grind to change a legacy system. Incentives matter as well. Leaders are often rewarded for announcing initiatives, not for the quietly difficult work of integrating them. And then there is misalignment, where innovation teams are loosely connected to the core business and do not share its constraints.
This pattern is not limited to one sector. Aravind Sakthivel has seen versions of Innovation Theatre in banks, retailers, manufacturers and technology firms. The props are different. The mechanics are similar.
The cost is not just wasted time. Innovation Theatre exhausts the people who are serious about real change. It teaches the wider organisation that “nothing real ever comes from this.” It sends a signal to customers and employees that leadership prefers announcements to outcomes.
Over time, the most practical and creative people either leave or disengage. The company keeps talking about innovation, but the capability to do it has quietly drained away.
To move from theatre to impact, you do not need more ideas. You need better decision rules.
For any innovation effort, start with a simple question. What problem are we solving, and for whom. If the answer is vague, you are probably building a showpiece. Then ask what decision will change if this work succeeds. If no decision, process or budget will change, you are deep in theatre.
Agree up front what success and failure look like, and what you will do in each case. Decide who in the core business owns the outcome, not just who runs the experiment. If ownership sits only in the lab, the idea is unlikely to survive.
Leaders can cut down Innovation Theatre with a few habits. Stop rewarding volume of initiatives. Reward a small number of projects that actually changed something. Ask for one slide that shows adoption and impact rather than ten slides of concept art. Be willing to stop projects that are not working, even when they have had a lot of internal visibility.
Innovation is not a show. It is a series of decisions under uncertainty. Treat it that way and your lab will start to matter again. That is the shift Aravind Sakthivel argues for throughout The Leadership Trap, and it is the shift that separates organisations that genuinely evolve from those that only perform evolution on stage.