Too many companies treat innovation like a New Year’s gym resolution: all equipment, no sweat. Real innovation starts with understanding your customer’s struggle, not launching a lab. Here’s how to get fit for real.
Innovation Theater: The Fancy Gym Syndrome
Corporate innovation is a lie.
There, I said it. It’s a luxury gym your CEO bought on January 1st. It comes with a glossy brochure, a branded water bottle, and the satisfying feeling of intending to get in shape. Your company has the state-of-the-art equipment—the innovation lab—and hires expensive personal trainers—the consultants. You talk a great game about your fitness goals in board meetings. But nobody ever actually sweats. Nobody pushes through the pain.
“You don’t get fit by owning a gym. You get fit by doing the work.”
❓When was the last time your innovation team did something truly uncomfortable? Not a brainstorm. Not a hackathon. Something that made you doubt your assumptions?
It’s a performative pantomime of progress, designed to make everyone feel good while the corporate body grows slower and more out of shape every quarter.
Meanwhile, a lean, hungry startup that actually runs marathons in the rain is about to lap you for the third time.
For years, I’ve been the personal trainer brought in to “fix innovation.” I’ve worked with Fortune 500s who spend more on the smoothie bar in their lab than most startups raise in a seed round. They all suffer from the same disease: they are addicted to the idea of being fit, but allergic to the painful reality of the workout—the deep, empathetic work of understanding the human behind the data point; the grueling reps of discovering what your customers are really trying to accomplish; and the disciplined, evidence-based plan of testing every assumption before you bet the company on it.
This isn’t just bad management. It’s an existential threat. And the cure isn’t a new piece of equipment. It’s a brutal dose of reality.
Section 1: The Diagnosis – Mistaking Equipment for Fitness
Why most innovation labs are just expensive decor
The modern corporation is designed to do one thing: execute a known, profitable business model at scale. This is like a bodybuilder who has perfected one single lift. The problem is, when the competition changes to a triathlon, that specialized muscle is useless.
The corporate response? Buy more equipment. Launch a “Center for Excellence.” This is the equivalent of buying a shiny new rowing machine because you think it looks innovative, without ever asking what fitness goal you’re trying to achieve. The result is always the same: a beautifully engineered machine that gathers dust.
❓How many of your current innovation initiatives would survive if judged solely on customer impact—not internal excitement?
Real-World Example: Let’s pour one out for the Microsoft Zune. On paper, it was a superior piece of engineering—a better treadmill than the iPod. The problem? Nobody just buys a treadmill; they join a gym. Apple understood the real “Job to be Done” wasn’t just ‘play music.’ It was ‘effortlessly manage my entire music life.’
While Microsoft’s engineers perfected the hardware, Apple built the entire fitness ecosystem with iTunes.
Microsoft’s failure was threefold. First, they obsessed over the machine, not the user’s complete journey. Second, they missed the critical social job: shipping a brown brick while Apple’s white headphones became a cultural icon. Finally, they were so busy building a better machine for yesterday’s race that they didn’t see the marathoners lining up for the next one—streaming.
Zune didn’t fail because the treadmill was bad. It failed because it never turned product-market fit into product-market traction.
Section 2: Start with Sweat – The Real Innovation Workout
Customer discovery isn’t a workshop. It’s a grind.
You don’t get fit by owning a gym. You get fit by doing the work. The real work of innovation isn’t brainstorming or building tech; it’s the grueling, unglamorous, and deeply human work of customer discovery. It’s about understanding the struggle you’re trying to solve.
❓ Have you spoken with a customer this month—not about your product, but about their stress, their stuck points, their decisions?
Real-World Example: I was with a B2B fintech firm convinced their clients—fast-growing businesses—needed a more powerful financial management dashboard. They wanted to add more data visualizations, more alerts, more ways to slice the numbers. This was like a trainer insisting on more bicep curls for a client who needs to run a marathon.
💡 What we did instead: We interviewed CFOs, consolidators, and controllers—not about features, but about the most stressful part of their quarter: preparing for a board meeting.
The “fitness goal” wasn’t to produce the consolidation report or file the quarterly results. The real “Job to be Done” was: “When I have to face the board, help me instantly build a financial narrative that makes us look competent and in control, so I can stop being a glorified bookkeeper and start being a strategic leader.”
The struggle wasn’t a lack of data; it was the crushing anxiety of trusting that data and turning it into a coherent story under pressure. Understanding this transformed their training plan. They stopped designing a better dumbbell and started building a “board-ready narrative engine.”
They targeted a specific, high-stakes struggle. That’s a market. “Businesses that want more dashboards” is a fitness fantasy.
Section 3: Train Like a Startup – The Discipline of Evidence
Don’t launch. Test.
Once you understand the fitness goal, the corporate impulse is to jump into a two-year, $20 million ‘fit’ program destined for failure. This is how you get injured.
❓What’s the cheapest, fastest way to learn whether your next big idea matters to anyone at all?
The alternative is a disciplined, evidence-based training plan. It’s a system for treating every idea not as a guaranteed success, but as a hypothesis to be tested. The goal isn’t to complete the marathon on day one; it’s to see if you can run the first mile without collapsing.
Real-World Example: A legacy B2B software company wanted to build a next-gen, all-in-one platform. The project plan was a massive, multi-year commitment. We scrapped it and created a one-page “training plan for the gym”—a Lean Canvas. The biggest risk wasn’t if they could build it; it was if anyone would care.
Instead of starting the two-year build, we ran a two-week experiment. We created a simple landing page describing the core value proposition for solving one specific, painful job. The call to action wasn’t “Buy Now.” It was “Request a Demo.”
A simple experiment looked like this:
- Clear job-to-be-done headline
- 3-sentence value prop
- 1 clear CTA (“Request a Demo”)
- No login, no tech required
The cost? Less than a one-year gym membership. The result? We learned in two weeks what would have taken them two years and millions of dollars to discover: people were interested in one specific feature, but not the whole platform. We found our starting exercise. We avoided a massive, company-breaking injury.
The Choice: Get Fit or Get Eaten
You can’t scale what your immune system is designed to kill.
Your board isn’t going to like this. It’s not comfortable. It replaces the certainty of a project plan with the uncertainty of customer discovery. But let’s be honest: a perfect workout plan is useless if the corporate body is riddled with arthritis. The real enemy isn’t a bad strategy; it’s the corporate immune system—the KPIs, budget cycles, and review boards—that is designed to kill anything new and unproven. It’s a system that rewards predictability, not learning.
❓Are you protecting your innovators from the immune system—or exposing them to it too soon?
Therefore, the first job of any leader isn’t just to start the workout but to become the personal trainer for the entire organization. Your role is to create a small, protected space where the rules are different—a gym-within-a-gym where the only KPI is learning about your customers, where failure is a data point, not a career-ending event, and where the budget is secure.
You have to build the gym before you can expect anyone to get fit.
Stop admiring the equipment. Start the real work. And if you’ve started the workout and are wondering how to scale that initial success without it being crushed by the corporate machine, that’s the next challenge.
💬 Ready to Build Your Gym?
If your gym looks good but no one’s sweating, I’d be happy to coach your team through the first mile. Let’s talk about building your innovation muscle—no consultants, no fluff. Just the work.
Further Reading
- Running Lean by Ash Maurya
- Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen
- Demand-Side Sales by Bob Moesta
- Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
- What is Jobs to Be Done? – Intercom Blog
Emmanuel Obadia & Partners | Transform & Innovate 