Advice

You can smell the future before it arrives, in a cluttered prototype, a half baked pitch, or an argument over whether the coffee machine should be replaced. That anticipation is what separates organisations that tinker from those that transform.

Innovation and creativity are often used as interchangeable buzzwords. They're not. They are cousins, sometimes sparring partners, sometimes collaborators, and both are essential if you want your business to survive another decade, let alone thrive. Over the years I've worked with boards in Sydney, startups in Melbourne, and federal departments in Canberra; the same pattern repeats: teams full of potential fail to convert ideas into impact because they mistake novelty for strategy.

Innovation: the doing, not just the dreaming

Let's be blunt. Invention is sexy. Innovation is sweaty. An idea, even a brilliant one, isn't innovation until it changes behaviour, creates value, or shifts an industry's economics. You can invent a device that tells you it's raining; you've only innovated if that device changes how people travel, buy umbrellas, or route deliveries.

This distinction matters because it shapes decisions. Radical leaps, the moonshots, are rare and expensive. Incremental improvements are the workhorses that keep your customers happy and your margins healthy. Neither is inherently better. The right mix depends on market structure, organisational appetite for risk, and the resources you can bring to bear.

A couple of contrarian views, up front:

• Design thinking is overrated as an organisational panacea. It's a useful tool, but not a substitute for clear strategy. Some teams treat it like a ritual rather than a discipline.
• 'Fail fast' sounds good at conferences. In practice, measured failure, controlled experiments and fast learning, is what separates careless risk from intelligent exploration.

Why creativity isn't optional

Creativity is the spark plug. It's the curiosity that says, "Why do we do this?" and the stubbornness that says, "There must be a better way." But creativity absent structure is just noise. The engine of creativity needs systems, budget, governance, customer insight and, crucially, leadership that will shield risky work from short term quarterly pressures.

If you ask a room of executives what matters most, many will cite creativity as a top leadership trait. A widely reported IBM Global CEO Study noted that a significant proportion of CEOs ranked creativity as the most important leadership quality for success. That sounds obvious until you walk into a procurement meeting where the culture favours the lowest cost over the best idea, or into a planning cycle where "safe" decisions outvote ambitious ones.

The creative process, not a neat linear path

Real world creative work is messy. Inspiration often begins with noticing a gap, a customer complaint, an awkward process, or a technology's side effect. From there, ideas are salted, sifted and stress tested. You'll prototype. You'll kill things. You'll rework them. You'll argue late into the night about user journeys and unit economics. The difference between teams that ship and teams that stall is the feedback loop: those who test with real users early and often iterate faster.

This is where interdisciplinary teams win. Engineers, marketers, operations people and even front line staff provide different lenses. Cross pollination breaks assumptions faster than any workshop. Yet many Organisations persist with silos because they're easier to manage than the mess of collaboration.

The ecosystem matters

Innovation doesn't occur in a vacuum. It needs scaffolding: funding, education, policy, procurement rules, and physically proximate networks. Australia's research and business ecosystems have pockets of world class capability, but conversion, moving ideas from lab to market, remains a challenge. Businesses that invest in continuous R&D, partnerships and capability development are the ones that sustain competitive advantage. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, business expenditure on research and experimental development in 2021 to 2022 was around $20 billion, a significant investment, but one that needs to be translated into commercial outcomes more consistently.

Radical vs incremental, choose your battles

Radical innovation creates new markets; incremental innovation defends and grows existing ones. The safest path for most organisations is a portfolio approach: protect core revenue streams with steady improvements while allocating a portion of resources to speculative projects. That's the 'ambidextrous organisation' theory in practice. Practically, that means dual operating models, one for efficiency, another for exploration, and leaders who can tolerate the discomfort of managing both.

Overcoming creative blocks

Creative blocks are real and often organisational rather than individual. Rules designed to prevent mistakes can suffocate curiosity. To reopen the tap:

• Rotate people between teams so they absorb different perspectives.
• Protect time for serendipity and tinkering.
• Reward learning, not just results.
• Make failure cheap. Run small experiments before scaling.

Remote work complicates this. Spontaneous watercooler collisions are fewer. Intentional design of rituals and virtual serendipity is necessary, shadowing, cross team standups, and rapid showcase sessions.

The interplay across domains: science, arts, business

Creativity and innovation manifest differently across fields. In science and technology, creativity produces hypotheses that rigorous testing either validates or debunks. In the arts, creativity reshapes cultural frames and often precedes broad social change. In Business, creative problem solving addresses unmet needs and turns them into revenue.

An instructive point: many breakthrough products come from mixing domains. Engineers who read poetry, marketers with coding skills, clinicians with product sensibilities. Cross disciplinary fluency creates cognitive "edges" where novel solutions emerge.

Risk and uncertainty: how smart organisations manage them

Risk is inherent in innovation. The trick is not to eliminate risk but to manage its shape and cost. I favour staged funding models: pilots, validations, scale. Each stage has different governance, metrics and risk appetite. Early stages need lean KPIs, learnings per dollar spent, while later stages focus on adoption and business metrics.

Scenario planning and red teaming also help. Pretend the worst case, then design mitigations. Accept uncertainty as data, not paralysis. This is where culture matters; teams that can surface bad news early and adjust without blame are far more likely to succeed.

Ethics matters, more than many leaders admit

Not every advance is unquestionably good. Technologies like AI bring massive opportunity and equally large ethical concerns: privacy, bias, accountability. Responsible innovation requires upfront consideration of societal impact, stakeholder engagement and clear governance. Ethical frameworks are not red tape; they're insurance. They protect brand, customers and societal licence to operate.

I'll offer a firm view: markets that ignore ethics will pay later, in trust and regulation. Consider this a practical, not merely philosophical, imperative.

Practical frameworks that work

If you are looking for tools, here are three that produce results in large organisations:

• Rapid prototyping with live customers. No lab shame. Ship small. Learn fast.
• Dual operating models. Run efficiency and exploration in parallel with distinct funding and governance.
• Innovation KPIs that measure learning and adoption, not vanity metrics. Track experiments, validated learnings, and customer behaviour changes.

A note of caution: frameworks are only as useful as the people and processes that operationalise them. Too many leaders slavishly adopt frameworks without investing in capability.

The human factor: leadership, incentives and capability

Leaders set the tone. If executives reward predictability and penalise risk, you'll get predictable outputs. Incentives must be aligned: performance metrics that reward experimentation, budgets that tolerate early stage 'failure', and promotion criteria that value collaboration and curiosity.

Capability building is equally important. Training programs, not one off workshops, that blend mindset, method and practice turn occasional innovators into operationally creative teams. We've seen durable change when training is paired with on the job application, mentoring and measurement.

Opportunities in constraints

Limited resources can be a spur to ingenuity. Some of the best innovations come from constraint: cheaper materials, less time, smaller teams. Forced simplicity often reveals more elegant solutions than sprawling budgets and endless features. If you can't afford to be wasteful, you'll be forced to prioritise ruthlessly, and that's often good for product market fit.

Future trends to watch

Several trends are shaping the next wave of innovation:

• AI as a multiplier: it's augmenting creativity more than replacing it. Expect new forms of hybrid human AI design.
• Democratisation of tools: lower barriers to prototyping mean more people can experiment; universities and corporate labs will no longer be the exclusive incubators of new ideas.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration will become the norm as complex problems demand diverse expertise.
• Ethics and governance will increasingly be embedded early in development cycles.

A slightly contentious forecast: within a decade many routine management decisions will be optimised by algorithms, leaving humans to set strategy and manage exceptions. That's both liberating and unnerving.

Final thoughts, the messy, beautiful work of making ideas stick

Creativity gives us the questions. Innovation provides the answers that matter in the marketplace and in society. The gap between the two is filled with hard decisions: who to hire, how to measure success, which partners to bring on board, and how to allocate scarce attention.

If I had to offer one practical piece of advice from years in boardrooms and workshops across Australia: invest not just in ideas, but in the conversion engine, capability, processes, and leaders who protect exploratory work from short termism. Treat creativity like an asset that needs stewardship.

We do this work with clients regularly, not because it's fashionable, but because the companies that master the messy middle between idea and impact are the ones that keep winning.

Innovation is not a destination. It's an ongoing muscle you must exercise. It's inconsistent, infuriating, and occasionally glorious.

And then, nothing. Or everything. Your call.

Sources & Notes

• IBM Global CEO Study 2010: "Creativity selected as most important leadership quality", IBM. (IBM Global CEO Study, 2010).
• Australian Bureau of Statistics, Research and Experimental Development, Businesses, 2021 to 2022, Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).