Innovation Theatre: Why Your “Digital Transformation” Looks Busy but Goes Nowhere
Somewhere out there, a company is holding its fifth “innovation sprint” this quarter.
Sticky notes everywhere. Coffee-fueled brainstorming. A few nice quotes about disruption on the wall.
And six months later?
The same processes, the same KPIs, the same spreadsheet bottlenecks — just now with a “Digital Transformation Office” overseeing them.
The Problem With Innovation Theatre
Digital transformation has become corporate theatre: a performance of progress where the scripts are impressive, but the outcomes are decorative.
You get pilots, not products. Reports, not results.
We’ve seen manufacturing firms run ten proof-of-concepts in a year and deploy… none. Not because the tech failed, but because no one owned the operational change that should have followed.
The culprit isn’t incompetence. It’s misalignment.
- Strategy teams chase “innovation” headlines.
- IT departments chase stability.
- Operations chase survival.
Nobody’s paid to make the whole thing work.
What Actually Moves the Needle
At Kaunas High Tech Cluster, our most successful projects have one thing in common: they start with a business choke point, not a buzzword.
A process bottleneck. A manual task that never scales. A dashboard that’s lying quietly to everyone.
That’s where practical innovation starts — in the unglamorous corners.
When Definra helped a public-sector client automate procurement approvals, it wasn’t a moonshot. It just removed 17 steps of bureaucratic friction. But the result? 40% faster processing and a happier audit team.
How to Kill Innovation Theatre in Your Org
- Ban the word “pilot.” You’re either testing for deployment or wasting everyone’s time.
- Tie innovation to cost or cycle time. If you can’t measure change, it’s theatre.
- Put engineers in the room early. They’ll tell you what’s real before the PowerPoint prints.
Innovation doesn’t need a department. It requires accountability — and teams brave enough to say, “This part’s broken. Let’s fix it first.”
Stop chasing digital theatre. Start funding practical transformation.
