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

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Three weeks ago, I watched a perfectly intelligent CEO spend forty-five minutes explaining to her leadership team why they needed to "think outside the box" for the seventh time this quarter. The irony wasn't lost on me – here was someone using the most overused business clichĂŠ in existence to encourage creative thinking.

But that's Australian corporate culture for you, isn't it? We love our buzzwords almost as much as we love complaining about them.

I've been consulting with businesses across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane for the past seventeen years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that 89% of innovation processes are fundamentally broken. Not struggling. Not suboptimal. Broken.

The Innovation Theatre Problem

Most companies aren't actually innovating – they're performing innovation. There's a massive difference, and if you don't know what I mean, you're probably part of the problem.

Innovation theatre looks like this: monthly brainstorming sessions where the same twelve people sit around a whiteboard covered in Post-it notes, talking about "disrupting the industry" while simultaneously following the exact same agenda structure they've used since Howard was Prime Minister. Someone inevitably mentions Uber. Another person brings up Netflix. Everyone nods sagely and pretends this constitutes strategic thinking.

Real innovation? That's messier. Scarier. It involves admitting your current approach might be completely wrong.

I remember working with a logistics company in Perth about five years back. Beautiful offices, state-of-the-art everything, an entire floor dedicated to their "Innovation Hub." Ping pong tables, bean bags, the works. Their innovation process involved quarterly workshops where department heads would pitch ideas to a panel of executives who'd never worked a day in operations.

Guess what happened to every single operational suggestion that might have actually improved customer service? Killed in committee for being "too incremental."

Meanwhile, their biggest competitor was quietly revolutionising delivery times by letting drivers suggest route optimisations through a simple mobile app. No bean bags required.

Why Smart People Keep Making Dumb Innovation Decisions

Here's the thing that drives me absolutely mental: most innovation failures aren't because people lack creativity. They fail because organisations systematically destroy creative thinking through process.

Take the classic "innovation funnel" approach. You know the one – collect hundreds of ideas, filter them through multiple approval stages, and eventually implement the safest possible option. This isn't innovation; it's risk aversion dressed up in fancy consulting terminology.

The best team development training programs understand that innovation happens when people feel psychologically safe to fail. But most companies create the exact opposite environment.

I've seen brilliant engineers stay silent in meetings because they know suggesting anything truly novel will result in being asked to complete a sixty-page business case that nobody will actually read. I've watched marketing teams self-censor because they've learned that "innovative" ideas get them assigned to committee meetings that last longer than a cricket test match.

And then management wonders why their innovation pipeline consists entirely of incremental improvements to existing products.

The Australian Innovation Blind Spot

We've got a particular problem here in Australia that nobody wants to talk about: we're absolutely terrified of looking stupid on the global stage. This manifests as an innovation paralysis where we won't try anything unless we're 100% certain it'll work.

Compare this to Silicon Valley, where failing fast and failing often is practically a religion. Or look at the Scandinavian countries, where government policy actively encourages experimental business models.

Meanwhile, Australian companies are still having board-level discussions about whether they should be on TikTok. In 2025.

I'm not saying we need to become like America – God knows we've got enough problems without copying everything they do. But we could learn something from their willingness to bet big on weird ideas.

Atlassian figured this out years ago. Instead of waiting for permission to innovate, they just started building software that solved their own problems. Now they're worth more than most ASX100 companies combined.

The Real Innovation Killers

After nearly two decades of watching companies struggle with this, I've identified the three things that absolutely guarantee innovation failure:

1. Innovation by Committee Nothing kills a good idea faster than asking seventeen people to approve it. By the time you've addressed everyone's concerns and incorporated their "helpful suggestions," you're left with something that pleases nobody and solves nothing.

The worst example I ever saw was a retail chain that took fourteen months to decide on a new checkout process. Fourteen months! By the time they'd finished their consultation process, three competitors had already implemented similar systems and moved on to the next thing.

2. The Perfection Trap This is where companies spend so much time refining ideas that they never actually implement anything. I call it "analysis paralysis with a business degree."

I worked with one manufacturing company that spent three years developing the "perfect" employee feedback system. They consulted with HR experts, conducted focus groups, ran pilot programs in different departments, and basically overthought every single aspect of the process.

Meanwhile, a smaller competitor started using simple weekly check-ins and quarterly goal reviews. Guess which approach actually improved employee satisfaction?

3. Innovation Only During Allocated Times This one makes me want to throw things. "Innovation Fridays," quarterly innovation workshops, annual strategy retreats – as if creativity operates on a corporate calendar.

Real innovation happens when someone's frustrated with a problem and decides to solve it. It happens during coffee breaks, in the shower, while stuck in traffic on the Monash Freeway. It doesn't care about your meeting schedule.

What Actually Works (Based on Real Examples, Not Theory)

I'm going to share something that might make traditional consultants uncomfortable: the best innovation processes I've seen are barely processes at all.

Take Canva, for example. Started by a frustrated design student who couldn't figure out why graphic design software was so impossibly complicated. Did she conduct market research? Sure, eventually. But first, she just started building something that solved her immediate problem.

Or look at Afterpay. Two guys who thought credit card applications were unnecessarily complicated. They didn't form an innovation committee or hire McKinsey to validate their idea. They just built a simpler way to pay for things.

The pattern here isn't rocket science: find a problem that genuinely annoys you, build the simplest possible solution, and iterate based on real user feedback.

The Five-Minute Innovation Audit

Want to know if your innovation process is broken? Ask these questions:

• How many great ideas died in the approval process last year?
• When was the last time someone from outside the leadership team suggested something that actually got implemented?
• Do your innovation meetings produce actionable outcomes, or just more meetings?
• Are people more afraid of proposing a bad idea or not proposing any ideas at all?
• How many of your "innovative" solutions are just copies of what successful companies did five years ago?

If those questions make you uncomfortable, congratulations – you've identified the problem.

Building Innovation Habits That Actually Stick

Here's what I tell every client who wants to fix their innovation culture: stop trying to manage innovation and start removing the barriers to it.

Give people permission to experiment without asking for permission. Set aside budget for small bets that might not work. Create space for people to work on problems they actually care about.

And for the love of all that's holy, stop making people fill out forms to suggest improvements to their own jobs.

The best emotional intelligence training teaches us that people are naturally creative when they feel supported and trusted. Innovation isn't a skill you need to teach – it's a behavior you need to enable.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Innovation

Most companies don't actually want innovation. They want the appearance of innovation without any of the risk, uncertainty, or potential for failure that comes with it.

Real innovation is uncomfortable. It means admitting your current approach might be wrong. It means investing time and money in things that might not work. It means being okay with looking foolish if your big bet doesn't pay off.

But here's the thing: in a market that's changing as fast as ours is, not innovating is the biggest risk of all.

Your competitors aren't waiting for your approval process to catch up. Your customers aren't going to patiently wait while you perfect your innovation methodology. And your best people aren't going to stick around if their ideas consistently disappear into bureaucratic black holes.

Starting Tomorrow

If you take nothing else from this article, remember this: innovation isn't about having the perfect process. It's about creating an environment where good ideas can survive long enough to become great ones.

Stop talking about innovation and start doing it. Give someone $5,000 and three weeks to solve a problem that's been bothering your customers. See what happens.

You might be surprised at what your people are capable of when you actually let them try.

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