Further Resources

Why Your Company's Innovation Process is Broken (And How to Actually Fix It)

Three years ago, I sat through the most expensive waste of time disguised as an "innovation workshop" that corporate Australia has ever produced. Sixty grand. Two days. Fifteen executives. And the groundbreaking outcome? A suggestion box. I kid you not.

That's when I realised most companies treat innovation like they treat fire drills - something they're legally obligated to do but hope they never actually need. The problem isn't lack of creativity. Australians are naturally inventive - we invented the bionic ear, WiFi, and the dual-flush toilet, for crying out loud. The problem is that most innovation processes are designed by people who've never actually innovated anything except new ways to schedule meetings.

The Theatre of Innovation

Walk into any corporate office in Sydney or Melbourne, and you'll find the same set pieces. Sticky notes plastered on walls like some kind of productivity disease. Whiteboards covered in incomprehensible diagrams that look like a toddler's attempt at circuit design. Bean bags that no one over 25 can get out of without assistance. And don't get me started on the "ideation spaces" - rooms painted in aggressive primary colours that would make a kindergarten teacher wince.

This is innovation theatre. It looks innovative. It feels innovative. But it produces about as much genuine innovation as a chocolate teapot produces tea.

The real kicker? Most of these sessions are run by facilitators who charge more per hour than a decent barrister and have about as much real-world business experience as my nephew's pet goldfish. They speak in buzzwords and frameworks borrowed from Silicon Valley, completely ignoring the fact that what works in Palo Alto might not translate to Parramatta.

Why "Brainstorming" is Actually Brain-Draining

Here's an uncomfortable truth: traditional brainstorming doesn't work. Never has. The research has been clear on this since the 1960s, but we keep pretending otherwise because it feels like we're being innovative.

The problem with getting everyone in a room to shout out ideas is that it combines the worst aspects of group psychology with the pressure to perform. Introverts shut down. Extroverts dominate. And the loudest voice in the room - usually someone from sales - convinces everyone that their half-baked idea about gamifying the procurement process is the next big thing.

I've seen this play out dozens of times. Effective communication training should be prerequisite for anyone running these sessions, but instead we get enthusiasm without expertise. The result? Ideas that sound impressive in the moment but crumble under the slightest scrutiny.

The Real Innovation Killers

Forget what the consultants tell you about "creating psychological safety" and "embracing failure." The biggest innovation killers in Australian businesses are much more mundane and much more fixable.

Approval Paralysis: When every new idea needs to go through six levels of approval before anyone can spend fifty dollars testing it, innovation dies a slow, bureaucratic death. I know companies where it takes longer to get approval for a small experiment than it took NASA to plan the moon landing.

The Quarterly Trap: Innovation operates on geological time scales, but businesses operate on quarterly reporting cycles. Guess which one wins? You can't innovate on a schedule, but try explaining that to shareholders who want to see "innovation metrics" every three months.

Risk Allergy: This is the big one. Australian business culture has become so risk-averse that we've essentially immunised ourselves against innovation. We want all the benefits of innovation with none of the uncertainty. It's like wanting to surf without getting wet.

I worked with one company - won't name names, but they're a major player in the mining sector - where the risk assessment process for testing a new customer feedback system required more documentation than their actual safety protocols for handling explosives. When your paperwork is more dangerous than your actual risks, you've lost the plot.

What Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Boring)

Real innovation isn't sexy. It doesn't happen in workshops with motivational posters and free Red Bull. It happens when you create systems that make small experiments easy, cheap, and fast.

The best innovation program I've ever seen was at a mid-sized logistics company in Brisbane. No bean bags. No brainstorming sessions. No innovation lab. Just a simple rule: any employee could spend up to $500 and one day per month testing an idea that might improve their work. No approval needed. No business case required. Just try it and report back.

Result? Thirty-seven small improvements in the first year. Three major process innovations. One idea that saved them $2.3 million annually. Cost of the program? About what they used to spend on catered brainstorming sessions.

The secret sauce wasn't the money - it was removing friction. Most good ideas die not because they're bad, but because the process of testing them is so cumbersome that people give up before they start.

The Customer Conversation Trap

Here's where most companies get it backwards. They spend months in conference rooms trying to imagine what customers want, when they could just ask them. But asking customers requires proper interview skills training, and most businesses treat customer research like an afterthought.

I've lost count of the number of companies I've worked with who spend more time and money on their Christmas party than they do on understanding their customers. Then they wonder why their innovations miss the mark.

The best customer insights don't come from focus groups or surveys. They come from actually watching people use your product or service. Get out of the office. Go to where your customers are. Watch them struggle. Listen to them complain. That's where innovation lives.

Woolworths figured this out years ago with their trolley design improvements. Instead of asking customers what they wanted in focus groups, they filmed people actually using trolleys in stores. The insights they gained from watching real behaviour led to innovations that improved the shopping experience for millions of Australians.

The Small Wins Strategy

Forget moonshots. Forget disruption. Focus on what I call "small wins that compound." Most successful innovations aren't revolutionary - they're evolutionary improvements that add up over time.

Take Bunnings. They didn't revolutionise hardware retail by inventing some groundbreaking new technology. They just made a series of small improvements: better store layouts, weekend sausage sizzles, helpful staff, convenient locations. None of these were individually revolutionary, but together they transformed an entire industry.

The problem with most innovation processes is they're optimised for big, dramatic breakthroughs that look good in presentations. But business innovation is more like fitness than surgery - it's the accumulation of small, consistent improvements that creates real transformation.

This means your innovation process should be designed for volume, not just quality. You want lots of small experiments, not a few big bets. Most will fail or have minimal impact, but that's fine. You're playing a numbers game.

The Implementation Reality Check

Here's what the innovation consultants won't tell you: having great ideas is easy. Implementing them is hard. Really hard. Most innovation processes are optimised for generating ideas, not for turning those ideas into reality.

I've seen companies with innovation labs full of brilliant prototypes that never make it to market because no one thought about the operational challenges of scaling them. It's like having a garage full of Formula 1 cars but no roads to drive them on.

The companies that actually innovate successfully spend more time on implementation than ideation. They build cross-functional teams that include operations people from day one. They test not just whether an idea works, but whether it can work at scale within their existing systems.

This is particularly important for Australian businesses, where we often have to adapt innovations developed for larger markets. What works for a company with 100,000 employees might need significant modification for a company with 500.

The Leadership Innovation Gap

Most senior executives talk a good game about innovation, but their actions reveal different priorities. They want innovation, but they also want certainty, predictability, and quarterly growth. These things are fundamentally incompatible.

Real innovation requires leaders who are comfortable with ambiguity and comfortable with failure. Not just intellectually comfortable - actually comfortable. I can spot a fake innovation leader from across the room. They're the ones asking for business cases for small experiments or demanding ROI projections for ideas that haven't been tested yet.

The best innovation leaders I've worked with understand that their job isn't to pick winning ideas - it's to create an environment where winning ideas can emerge and be recognised quickly.

Making Innovation Routine

The companies that innovate consistently don't treat innovation as a special activity. They embed it into their normal operations. They make it routine, systematic, and boring.

This might sound counterintuitive, but innovation needs to be as routine as payroll processing or safety checks. It needs systems, processes, and regular review cycles. It needs to be someone's actual job, not something they do between their "real" work.

The most innovative company I've worked with has a simple monthly process: every team identifies one thing that's frustrating them, tests a potential solution, and reports back on results. No fanfare. No special sessions. Just continuous, systematic improvement.

That's real innovation. Not the flashy stuff that gets written up in business magazines, but the practical, unglamorous work of making things a little bit better every month.

Most Australian businesses have everything they need to innovate successfully. They just need to stop making it so complicated.