Blog

As the methodology partner behind the AFR’s Most Innovative Companies List, Inventium has access to a whole heap of data about how Australia and New Zealand’s most innovative companies manage their innovation programs. We gather information from hundreds of companies about aspects relating to their innovation process, their innovation skills and capabilities, their organisational culture, theirRead more

‘Think differently’, says the poster of values as you come out of the lifts and into the office. And while that’s great advice, and the brain is capable of many amazing feats, thinking differently because you’re told to ‘think differently’ is perhaps not one of them. So how do you actually ‘think differently’? Research showsRead more

I have just finished reading an excellent book called “The Four” which charts the world domination of Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google. It’s filled with a huge number of interesting insights, too many to cover here. It is only one sentence of 10,000 buried deep in the Facebook chapter that prompts this post. The authorRead more

Businesses live and die by the decisions that their customers (or non-customers) make each and every day. Ultimately, it’s our customers that decide whether or not our innovations are a huge success or a whopping failure. So it makes sense that when we want to identify our next big innovation success, that we first lookRead more

Innovation is a word at the tip of almost every CEO’s lips. However, despite the best of intentions, many organisations are killing innovation. There are several issues that these organisations have in common.   Leaders don’t walk the talk While the majority of CEOs and their leadership teams talk about innovation, many unfortunately don’t doRead more

Many Australian companies tend to over complicate innovation experimentation. Having mentored a mix of large companies, start ups and not for profit organisations, I’ve observed this trend cutting across them all. Part of the problem comes from all the amazing resources so readily available to people. From the fantastic book ‘The Lean Startup’ by EricRead more

I was raised to have a healthy sense of curiosity. For example, my dad – being an engineer – decided that playtime was the perfect opportunity to show me how to disassemble our family computer and put it all back together again, just to see how it worked! The residual effect this has had onRead more

Having the title ‘Inventiologist’ has a habit of getting you into some interesting conversations about how the Inventium crew help make innovation tangible, repeatable and profitable. One of the most common things I hear early on in these conversations is, “oh, so you help companies come up with ideas”. My favourite part of these chatsRead more

Can you guess who said that “if you just listen to (customers)…they will misguide more than guide you”? Why, none other than our favourite disruptive innovation thought leader, Clayton Christensen. He explained in this technology report that customers are less articulate when assessing larger impact innovations, thus we need to be careful with how theyRead more

We’ve turned our best practice innovation process ourselves a number of times over the past few months, and it’s really reminded me how difficult it is to avoid common innovation mistakes. Yes, even those who are trained – and teach – best practice innovation can be tempted by innovation faux pas! A few months ago,Read more