Innovation
Innovation theater and the decision nobody rehearses
Most innovation labs report ideas submitted and hackathons run, and almost never a venture they stopped. Why the hardest call in corporate innovation is a decision about people, and why so few leaders get to practise it.
The lab has exposed brick walls and a 3D printer nobody has switched on in months. One wall is covered in sticky notes from a workshop that ran in the spring. A screen by the entrance shows the innovation dashboard: ideas submitted, hackathon participants, the satisfaction score from the last event.
I have been shown around a lot of rooms like this one. The dashboard is usually the most revealing thing in them, because of what it leaves out. No ventures launched. No revenue. And not a single idea that was stopped.
The people running these labs are rarely the problem. Most of them are smart and know exactly what the dashboard leaves out. They run workshops because a workshop is easy to schedule and easy to report. They manage an idea funnel because a funnel with forty-seven ideas in it looks good in a quarterly review. People call the result innovation theater, and the name has stuck because it fits.
The number that never appears
Of all the signals, the one I trust most is the kill count. A lab that has never stopped anything on evidence is not filtering ideas. Every concept that enters either progresses or fades quietly, which is a way of never deciding.
Stopping a venture is mostly a question of people. The data is often clear by week six. What is unclear is who says it out loud. The executive who sponsored the lab gets credit for investing in innovation whatever comes out of it. The team learns quickly which work gets noticed: a hackathon is visible, a customer interview is not. A report that says "we tested twelve ideas and eleven did not hold" is worth far more than "forty-seven ideas in the pipeline", and it is much harder to present.
Then there is the calendar. Ventures move in weeks. Budgets move once a year. A lab whose real objective has become surviving budget season will produce what budget season rewards.
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Where programmes stall
When I look back at the programmes that went nowhere, the same gaps keep coming up. There was no path from the event to a decision: nobody had committed people or money to what came out of it, so the ideas ended in a deck. Success was measured by participation rather than by anything the business would notice a year later. And no senior person had put their own name on the outcome, so the programme was the first thing cut when budgets tightened.
None of these is a methodology problem. Most labs know how to run customer interviews and build a rough prototype. What they rarely get to practise is the moment after the evidence arrives, when someone has to take it to the people who will lose something if it is acted on.
The meeting after the evidence
Picture that meeting. The concept has passed its customer tests. Now it needs a budget line from a CFO who has promised the market a margin recovery. It changes how a sales team gets paid, and the revenue chief wants to know who pays his reps in the meantime. The product chief built the first version with a small squad and no budget, and she wants to know who owns it now. The founder on the board reads every page.
Everyone in that room is rational. Each of them has a reason to slow the decision down, and some of those reasons are never said out loud. What gets agreed in the meeting is not always what happens the week after.
This is the meeting I built Halyard around. You take the seat of the first Chief Innovation Officer at Halyard, a listed CRM vendor in Amsterdam whose per-seat licences are being eaten by AI agents and by customers building their own. You do not own the roadmap or the sales force. Your power is the CEO's sponsorship, the money, and what you can show for it. In the first round you write a two-page innovation thesis for the board, choose up to three bets and decide what you will not do. By the third round you are putting a pricing decision in writing, with the bridge from today's numbers.
Annelies Bakker, the CFO, asks the same question of every proposal: is this inside the guidance or on top of it? Gavin Mercer built the sales organisation and is not against agents. He is against anything that makes his field poorer before it makes them richer. Neither of them is a villain, and neither of them is going to make the decision easy.
Rehearsing the reaction
Innovation teams spend weeks rehearsing the pitch and almost no time rehearsing the reaction to it. A business wargame puts the weight on the reaction. The decision meets the people who respond to it, round after round, and the consequences carry over. You can take the cautious version of a thesis and the bold version of the same thesis, and watch which stakeholders move. The engine includes randomness, so the same move will not land the same way twice.
The same tension sits at the heart of most strategy work, well beyond innovation. A new business model, a price change, a reorganisation: each one has to get through the people who carry the old model. Business leaders bring those decisions to a wargame for the same reason.
A lab that never kills anything has, in a sense, never been asked to decide. I am still not sure how much of that is the lab's failure and how much is the design of the company around it. My guess is mostly the second, and that most labs would stop more ideas if stopping one were something anyone had practised.
Matthieu Bodin · 7 October 2026 · 5 min read