My Thoughts

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

Right, let me tell you what happened last month that made me want to throw my laptop out the window of my Brisbane office. I'm sitting in yet another "innovation workshop" - you know the type, where everyone's forced to wear name tags and pretend they're excited about brainstorming with colleagues they barely talk to in the lift.

The facilitator, bless her cotton socks, starts with the classic: "There are no bad ideas!" Then proceeds to spend the next four hours systematically crushing every creative thought that emerges. Classic corporate Australia at its finest.

Here's what I've learned after 18 years of watching companies butcher innovation: most organisations treat creativity like a weekend hobby rather than a core business function. They want Netflix-level disruption with Blockbuster-level commitment. It's madness.

The Fatal Flaw Everyone Ignores

Innovation isn't about having more brainstorming sessions. It's about creating psychological safety for your people to actually speak up when they see problems.

I was working with a logistics company in Melbourne - won't name names, but they move a lot of parcels - and discovered their best operational improvements were coming from the warehouse staff. Not the executive team. Not the consultants they'd hired for $200k. The blokes unloading trucks.

But here's the kicker: management had no formal process to capture these insights. These workers were solving problems daily but their solutions were dying in the loading dock. Meanwhile, the C-suite was paying consultants to reinvent wheels that their own employees had already perfected.

The problem? Communication training between levels of the organisation was non-existent. Upper management spoke MBA. Floor staff spoke common sense. Neither group had learned the other's language.

Why Your Innovation Lab is Just Expensive Theatre

Let me be controversial here: 90% of corporate innovation labs are performance art. Expensive performance art.

Companies love them because they look progressive. Glass walls, bean bags, whiteboards covered in sticky notes. Very Silicon Valley. Very impressive for the annual report photos.

But innovation labs fail because they're isolated from the actual business. They're like having a gym membership but never going to the gym. All potential, no results.

Real innovation happens when you integrate creative thinking into your existing processes. Not when you create a separate building where people can "think outside the box" for forty hours a week before returning to their normal jobs where thinking outside the box gets you in trouble.

I've seen this pattern everywhere from Perth to Cairns. The lab produces brilliant concepts that never see implementation because they were developed in a vacuum. Meanwhile, the business units that need to execute these ideas weren't involved in creating them.

It's like designing a house without asking the people who'll live in it what they actually need.

The Three Things Actually Killing Your Innovation

First: You're asking for ideas but not providing resources to test them. Ideas without execution budgets are just expensive wish lists.

Second: Your approval process moves slower than a Brisbane bus in peak hour traffic. By the time an idea gets through your committees, your competitors have already launched three versions of it.

Third: You punish failure more than you reward experimentation. This creates a culture where people only suggest safe, incremental improvements. Revolutionary? Forget about it.

I worked with a retail chain - again, won't name them, but they sell a lot of stuff - where a store manager suggested a simple change to their checkout process. Would've saved customers about two minutes per transaction. Massive improvement for customer experience.

The suggestion sat in the "innovation pipeline" for eight months while various departments argued about implementation. Eight months! Meanwhile, their main competitor rolled out self-checkout systems and captured half their weekend trade.

What Actually Works (From Someone Who's Seen It)

Stop treating innovation like a special event. Make it part of everyone's job description.

At one mining company I worked with - and these aren't typically known for their progressive thinking - they implemented something brilliant. Every monthly team meeting had to include one discussion about "what's not working and how could we fix it." Simple. No fancy facilitators, no expensive consultants.

Within six months, they'd implemented over 200 small improvements. Nothing revolutionary on its own, but collectively they saved millions in operational costs and dramatically improved safety outcomes.

The key was making it routine rather than revolutionary.

They also did something smart with team development training - they taught their supervisors how to actually listen to ideas without immediately explaining why they wouldn't work. Revolutionary stuff, right?

The Australian Advantage We're Wasting

We Australians have a cultural advantage in innovation that we're completely squandering. We're natural problem-solvers. We improvise. We make do. We question authority.

But somehow, when we walk into corporate environments, we check these traits at the door and start behaving like we're in a Jane Austen novel. All politeness and process.

I've worked with companies in Singapore, New York, and London. Trust me, they envy our cultural willingness to challenge the status quo. But instead of leveraging this, we're trying to copy their overly formal innovation processes.

It's like taking a Ferrari and driving it in first gear because that's how the manual says to start.

The Fix Is Simpler Than You Think

Want to actually improve innovation in your organisation? Try this:

Give every employee thirty minutes a month to work on solving any problem they've noticed. Not their assigned problems. Any problem.

Document what they try. Share what works. Don't punish what doesn't.

Remove the requirement for business cases on anything under $5,000. If someone thinks they can improve something for less than five grand, let them try. The cost of your approval process probably exceeds that anyway.

Create "innovation time" that's actually protected. No meetings, no emails, no interruptions. Just thinking and tinkering time.

Most importantly, celebrate the attempts, not just the successes. Innovation is a numbers game. You need a lot of attempts to get a few wins.

Why This Matters More Than Your Latest Strategy Document

Innovation isn't about having the next big idea. It's about creating an environment where good ideas naturally emerge and actually get implemented.

Your competition isn't just other companies anymore. It's every organisation that's figured out how to move from idea to execution quickly. Whether they're in your industry or not.

The companies winning right now aren't the ones with the smartest people or the biggest budgets. They're the ones with the shortest distance between "what if we tried..." and "let's see if this works."

The rest is just expensive theatre.

The Bottom Line

Stop waiting for innovation to happen to you. Stop creating processes that slow everything down in the name of "rigour." Stop isolating creativity from execution.

Start treating innovation like what it actually is: the basic business skill of noticing problems and trying solutions.

Your people already know what's broken. They probably know how to fix it too. The question is whether you're going to listen.

Because if you're not, someone else will. And they'll hire your best people while they're at it.

Looking to improve innovation in your workplace? Check out these resources: Why Professional Development Courses Are Essential for Career Growth | Communication Skills Training Expectations | Team Development Strategies