My Thoughts

Why Your Company's Innovation Process is Broken (And How I Learnt This the Hard Way)

Three years ago, I walked into a "Innovation Workshop" at a Fortune 500 company in Melbourne and watched twenty-seven highly paid executives spend four hours arranging Post-it notes on a wall whilst someone with a man-bun facilitated their "creative journey." The only thing anyone innovated that day was new ways to check their phones without being noticed.

That's when it hit me. Most corporate innovation processes aren't designed to create anything new—they're designed to make people feel like they're being innovative whilst keeping everything exactly the same.

The Theatre of Innovation

Here's what I've observed after fifteen years consulting with companies across Australia: 89% of innovation initiatives are pure performance art. You've got your innovation labs (usually just regular meeting rooms with beanbags), your hackathons (where the winning idea is always something IT had already planned), and your "blue sky thinking sessions" that somehow always land on ideas that require no budget changes.

I remember working with a Brisbane manufacturing company that spent six months developing their "Innovation Framework." Beautiful document. Colour-coded process maps. Stakeholder matrices. The works. When I asked what they'd actually innovated, the room went quiet. Turns out they'd innovated a really comprehensive way to avoid innovating.

The problem isn't that these companies lack creative people. Walk through any office in Sydney or Perth and you'll find brilliant minds everywhere. The issue is that most innovation processes are designed by committees who fundamentally misunderstand how creativity actually works.

Why Your Process is Backwards

Traditional innovation methodology follows this pattern: define the problem, brainstorm solutions, evaluate options, select the best one, implement. Sounds logical, right?

Wrong. This approach assumes innovation happens in neat, predictable stages. But real innovation is messy. It starts with someone noticing something odd, getting curious, and following that curiosity down unexpected rabbit holes.

Take Atlassian, for instance. Their biggest innovations didn't come from formal innovation processes—they came from developers scratching their own itches and building tools they personally wanted to use. That's how you get products people actually need rather than solutions to problems nobody has.

I've seen companies spend months defining problems that don't exist. One Perth-based service company I worked with convened a twelve-person committee to identify "innovation opportunities in customer service excellence." After extensive research and stakeholder interviews, they concluded they needed to "leverage digital transformation to enhance omnichannel customer experience optimisation."

Translation: they wanted to add a chatbot to their website. Which they could have done in two weeks without a committee.

The Real Innovation Killers

Death by Process: When you need seventeen approvals to try something new, you won't try anything new. I've watched brilliant ideas die in procurement committees. One company took eight months to approve a $500 software trial because it needed to go through "proper innovation governance channels."

Failure Phobia: Australian corporate culture has a weird relationship with failure. We love stories about entrepreneurs who failed their way to success, but inside companies, one failed pilot project can end careers. So people play it safe. They propose innovations that can't possibly fail, which means they can't possibly succeed either.

The Committee Effect: Innovation by committee is like trying to paint the Mona Lisa with twenty people holding the same brush. You end up with beige compromise rather than breakthrough thinking.

Success Metrics That Kill Creativity: When you measure innovation by ROI calculations and quarterly targets, you eliminate anything truly innovative. Real innovation often looks terrible on spreadsheets before it changes everything.

What Actually Works (From the Trenches)

After years of watching companies get this wrong, here's what I've seen work:

Give People Permission to Waste Time: 3M famously allows employees to spend 15% of their time on personal projects. Sounds expensive? Post-it Notes came from that "wasted" time. How much revenue has that generated?

Start Small and Ugly: Every major innovation started as something that looked ridiculous to outsiders. The iPhone was "just another phone" until it wasn't. Stop trying to launch perfect solutions and start shipping minimum viable experiments.

Embrace Productive Failure: One Adelaide tech company I know celebrates "failure parties" where teams share what didn't work and why. They've created a culture where failing fast is actually encouraged. Their innovation rate increased by 240% in eighteen months.

Kill the Innovation Department: Seriously. Innovation isn't a department's job—it's everyone's job. When you centralise innovation, you're basically saying "creativity happens over there, not here."

The Australian Advantage We're Wasting

We Australians have natural advantages when it comes to innovation. We're pragmatic problem-solvers who aren't afraid to question authority. We invented the rotary clothesline, the wine cask, and dual-flush toilets—all simple solutions to everyday problems.

But somewhere in our corporate environments, we've convinced ourselves that innovation needs to be complicated. We bring in consultants from Silicon Valley to teach us how to think differently, when what we really need is to stop overthinking and start building.

The companies I see succeeding with innovation aren't the ones with the fanciest processes. They're the ones creating environments where curious people can follow interesting problems without having to justify every step to a steering committee.

Stop Innovating Innovation

Here's my controversial opinion: most companies should stop trying to innovate their innovation process and just remove the barriers to people being naturally innovative.

Instead of innovation workshops, give people time management training so they can carve out thinking space. Instead of idea management platforms, teach better communication skills so good ideas can actually get heard.

The best innovation I've witnessed happened when a junior employee was allowed to spend three hours solving something that annoyed her, without having to explain why it mattered to the business case committee. That three-hour project became a productivity tool that saved the company 1.2 million annually.

The Reality Check

Look, I'm not saying all structure is bad. You need some process to scale ideas and allocate resources sensibly. But when your innovation process requires more documentation than actually innovating, you've lost the plot.

Most companies aren't failing at innovation because they lack creativity. They're failing because they've created elaborate systems that accidentally prevent the very thing they're designed to encourage.

If you want to know whether your innovation process is working, ask yourself this: when was the last time someone in your organisation successfully implemented an idea that initially seemed stupid to everyone else?

If you can't remember, then your process isn't broken—it's working exactly as designed. It's just designed to maintain the status quo whilst appearing progressive.

And that's not innovation. That's innovation theatre.

Real innovation happens when you stop managing creativity and start unleashing it. Everything else is just expensive consulting fees and really organised Post-it notes.

Looking to improve your team's innovation capabilities? Sometimes the answer isn't a better process—it's better people skills and clearer communication. That's where proper training makes the difference.