Companies such as Apple, Nike and Google run "secret" and highly secure innovation facilities that are, paradoxically, rather well-known and discussed. That's a sign that their obsession with secrecy is a kind of theater aimed at whetting consumers' appetites for the next big thing, writes Austin Carr. "It's easy to buy into it all -- to be so taken by the magic of seeing 'Access Granted' on a keypad that you are blind to the fact that there's nothing terribly magical about what's inside," Carr writes.