Case Study: Strategy vs. Theatre
Two real, contrasting approaches to corporate innovation - one anchored to strategy, one to appearances.
Amazon's innovations - Prime, AWS, Kindle, Marketplace - were never innovation for its own sake. Each began by "working backwards" from a customer need and was tied to explicit strategic goals: growth, relevance, and resilience. AWS, famously, turned Amazon's own infrastructure into a new growth engine that now underpins much of the internet. Discipline, funding, and accountability carried ideas to adoption.
Between roughly 2014 and 2019, hundreds of large companies opened shiny "innovation labs" - beanbags, exposed brick, hackathons, and press releases. Many had no mandate tied to strategy and no path to carry ideas into the core business. A large share were quietly shut down within a few years, having produced demos and headlines but little lasting advance. The label "innovation theatre" was coined for exactly this pattern.
What separated them
A strategic goal: Amazon's efforts each served growth/relevance/resilience; the theatre labs served the goal of appearing innovative.
A path to adoption: Amazon carried ideas into the business with funding and ownership; many labs had no bridge to the core.
Accountability for outcomes: Amazon measured adopted value; the labs often measured activity - ideas generated, events held.
Your Turn
Think it through, then reveal.
Which pattern does your organisation resemble more - Amazon's strategically-anchored innovation, or the theatre labs? What is the single change that would move you toward substance?
Sources
- Bryar, C. & Carr, B., Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon, 2021.
- Blank, S., "Why Companies Do 'Innovation Theater'", HBR, 2019.
- Capgemini & press coverage on the rise and closure of corporate innovation labs, 2014-2019.