So Many Corporate Innovation Labs, So Little Innovation

It’s the innovator’s day. CEOs everywhere know that keeping their companies relevant in a rapidly changing world is imperative and that innovation is the solution. Corporate leaders also know their legacies depend on their organization’s ability to reinvent itself.

It’s not going well.

The CEOs I talk with admit privately that they’re getting tired of hearing Uber, Airbnb and Netflix disruption stories. They want their organizations to play more offense. They want to be market-makers, not just share-takers.

In response, CEOs have climbed onto the innovation-lab bandwagon. Corporate innovation labs have sprung up like weeds across industries around the world. Any self-respecting CEO now has a corporate innovation lab!

I have visited many of these innovation labs and spoken with those who’ve been tapped on the shoulder to start and lead them. My overall impression is that, at best, most of these innovation labs will produce only tweaks to today’s business models.

Innovation labs will launch with lofty rhetoric from CEOs about transformation and thinking out-of-the-box. But as soon as line executives and business unit leaders get control of the lab’s agenda, it is destined to produce only tweaks. This shouldn’t be a surprise, because corporate innovation labs are structured, resourced and governed to produce incremental improvements to today’s business models.