As someone who was born and grew up in the Soviet Union, I know a thing or two about the shortage of foods and goods.

Our “out-of-office” life was a perennial chase of the hard-to-get stuff, which was pretty much everything you’d need to live above a mere subsistence level.

This has instilled in my compatriots and me one simple habit: buy something first, while it’s still available, then decide whether you need this something or not. This approach was especially useful with imported items, which were rare, often completely unknown, and whose value was therefore even more difficult to assess in advance.

One such item was “French perfume,” and I’m using the quotation marks here deliberately. When buying a precious bottle — on the black market or through a friendly connection — you didn’t have the luxury of knowing the brand of the future acquisition. It was just it, a bottle of “French perfume.” Pondering if the intended receiver of the item, your wife or girlfriend, would prefer Chanel, Guerlain, or Magie Noire, was completely pointless: you could buy only what you were offered.

On the positive side, your loved one wouldn’t care much, either; she would just be delighted with the gift. She would also appreciate your effort to please her — and be proud of your ability to get things done.

Today’s corporate innovation reminds me of this “French perfume.”

Volumes have been written about the 3-Horizon Model of Innovation that places innovation projects into incremental, “adjacent,” and transformational buckets, each implying a different time horizon and funding level. A complementary, equally useful, classification of corporate innovation projects into market-creating, sustaining, and efficiency innovations, each corresponding to a specific stage of business model development, has also been proposed.

And yet, time and again, our corporate innovation leaders can’t provide a working definition of what innovation means for their organizations. It’s just that, “innovation.”

Innovation charters, a formal document outlining the major aspects of the organization’s innovation strategy, are almost unheard of. Attempts to introduce portfolio management of innovation projects are often met with a deadly fire because “structure” supposedly kills innovation. Worse, many corporate innovators sincerely believe that every innovation must be “disruptive,” while all other types of it are for losers.

The lack of understanding of the various types of innovation inevitably leads to confusion about the available innovation tools. A simple idea that for each innovation objective, there must be a specific innovation tool most suited for this objective, sounds almost foreign. Instead, one-size-fits-all fads follow each other like ocean waves hitting the corporate shorelin— hackathons, skunkworks, innovation labs, corporate accelerators, corporate venture funds — with inevitable complaints of low innovation returns coming later. “Idea generation” campaigns are omnipresent, confusing minds, draining resources, frustrating participants, and resulting in pretty much nothing.

Steve Blank has a shrewd definition for our corporate innovation process: innovation theater. My friend Andy Binns at Change Logic likes to use an equally colorful term: innovation zoo. I humbly hope that my term, “the French perfume innovation,” will become as popular as Steve’s and Andy’s.

What is to be done?

My solution is simple, if not quite revolutionary: education.

We need to get back to the drawing board and help organizations understand the very basics of innovation: definitions, typology, infrastructure, processes, metrics, and incentives. We need to create a set of short narratives (“Innovation101,” so to speak) giving organizations a place to start, in a practical and intuitive way.

And we need help from academic researchers studying innovation.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not calling on them to stop deepening our theoretical understanding of the innovation process. Instead, I’m urging them not to forget that by producing knowledge that the innovation practitioners can’t use, they make their future work less meaningful. Nor am I saying that the “new models of innovation” are completely useless. What I’m saying is let’s learn first to use the models we already have.