NYT today has a story on corporate innovation centers http://bit.ly/67moKF Big news media just love to cover this kind of institutionalized marketing bureaucracy (IM rather than lean marketing (Jay Conrad Levinson (lean before Lean was a word!), Steven Blank, etc.).  And once the institionalized marketing bureucats see themselves covered in the media, they have all the feedback they need that they are adding value. Using the Johansson Nonaka (RELENTLESS) criteria of real customers, using real products, in the real context, the IMB approaches usually fail on real context 100% of the time, and real customers 50% of the time (corporate schmexperts are everywhere and are not customers). The above article talks about how 3M does not use any finished products in their innovation centers because they don't want to constrain ideas.  Which means that the real products criteria is out 100% of the time at 3M. Pitney Bowes may do better.  Because they have real products that they invite real customer jobs into their innovation center to test, they may actually get real customers, real product, real context (assuming the printing system is the context). But it is just too bad that our American marketing instinctive biases are against getting into customer context first.  That we only reluctantly leave the realm of opinions (inside the building) to get data outside.  That American media celebrate the building of corporate technology half-way houses that systematically create garbage in (real customers fail, real products fail, real context fail).  American companies still have a 90% fail rate with IMB methods.  This isn't usually mentioned by the big media writing. There is a lot of American marketing information pollution for lean small fry to avoid. bill meade