Demo Days- Are They Just Innovation Theatre?

Ramboll Innovation Accelerator Demo Day 2019

Innovation theatre is one of my favourite terms. It encompasses everything from the sets that are staged in innovation “garages” or WeWork outposts with swish coffee machines, bowls of m&ms and fluorescent bean bags, to the startup safaris of Silicon Valley.

And often, I hear Corporate Innovation Demo Days thrown into the genre. The flashy events at the end of an Internal Incubator or Accelerator that end in little to no action. That aim to trigger culture and mindset shift across an organisation with a 5 hour event.

Now I’m an unashamed sceptic when it comes to showy and shiny innovation which doesn’t deliver results on the bottom line, but I think it’s time to step to the defence of Demo Days- when done right.

So what is a Demo Day Done Right?

In my experience, Demo Days that go beyond innnovation theatre all have the following ingredients, which trigger real impact not just for the ideas being pitched, but beyond that, for the wider organisation.

1. Real investment outcome: the pitches should be for further investment, whether this is more time to test, funding for additional hires, money to spend on experimentation or big cheques for scale.
2. Sharing learnings: when we share not just the outcomes but also the learnings of a program across an organisation we magnify the impact. This is even more relevant where teams are pitching to pivot or stop an idea because the market data invalidated initial assumptions. Sharing learnings stops the same ideas being tested repeatedly or over-invested in in other areas of the business and may also spark new ideas for future programs or internal innovations.
3. Rewarding the hard path of intrapreneurship: it’s not easy and after months of being told to “go faster” everytime teams feel they can’t go any further, they have more than earned a high energy, all confetti canons firing day to get recognition and public praise and prove just how far they’ve come, both with their idea, and also their own development.
4. Get people really excited about working for or with an innovative organisation: yes this one comes closest to innovation theatre- but it still isn’t about showboating. It’s about acknowledging that top talent increasingly puts working at an innovative company high on their own agendas. And that clients/customers/partners increasingly look for innovative solutions as a key differentiator when picking a supplier/product.
5. Inspire others to get involved: when employees see innovation being actively called out and rewarded it starts the journey to make entrepreneurship a real career path within a large corporate, this may manifest in more creativity, a willingness to test and learn that filters down into every day tasks, or more ideas filtering into organisation wide programs.
6. Building buy-in and gaining Champions: for the ideas coming out of a Corporate Innovation program, it can be shock- you’ve spent months working in a largely protected bubble, with intensive hands on coaching to keep pushing you further and the remit to ignore politics as much as possible and focus on market validation over internal opinions. But on leaving the accelerator, the bubble can quickly pop. Demo Days can play a powerful role in gaining top level buy-in for ideas, particularly where C-Suite or Group Executive Boards and Leadership teams are involved in the decision making. By actively asking them to invest, they add not only funding, but credibility to the ideas, giving them more political clout and helping to build crucial champions within the corporation who can help continue to push the ideas at pace.
7. Ideas don’t go silent after Demo Day: Demo Day may feel like the big finale, but while it may be the climax of the program, it’s just the beginning for ideas, as they now look to really go to market, scaling the pipeline they’ve already been building out, and moving from pilot stage to real product launch. It’s key that Demo Day doesn’t signal the end of teams shouting about their successes both internally and externally, but serves as a launchpad to give teams exactly what they need to pick up even more pace.
8. Scream and shout and let it all out: after months of working on ideas it’s time to make them public- the ideas are ready to go live, with real customers already brought in and the value proven- teams should no longer have anything to fear from external press and the corporate stands to gain a huge amount (again for talent recruitment and retention, as well as customer acquisition) beyond just the ideas, but for the wider brand.

It’s time to shift Demo Day’s firmly out of the innovation theatre bucket and put them to their best use; to drive real business impact, culture and mindset shift and shout about the real successes of the programs they celebrate.