Unico’s Peter Evans-Greenwood and Andrew Sherman, attended the InnoFuture Momentum forum on October 13th. The format was an open discussion in the round at Telstra’s Executive Briefing Centre in Collins St.

Roughly 50 people were involved in the discussion, led by Neville Christie (CEO Institute, Innovation Group) and egged along by a panel including Ilya Joel-Pitcher, Mark Toomey, Hafeez Bana, Nicole Keating, and Peter.

We are all fascinated by the future. The future always looks brighter. The prospect of a promotion, developing a winning product or promotion, bigger budget, new government incentive “tomorrow, next quarter, next year“. If we realise that there is no future, only what we do today, we can focus on innovation that will result in a better future. Risk, courage, learning from parallel industries and cultures, harnessing our talents… Thinking with an open mind how to create a better world…

The first thing popping out of the discussion was the lack of agreement on just what innovation is. Opinions range from the bold (innovation as a tool for disruptive transformation) through to the pragmatic (innovation as the opportunity to do something different today than you did yesterday), with all the shades in between. The challenge, which seemed to be common across the audience, was how to make innovation meaningful for their organisations. Innovation is not a problem amenable to one size fits all solutions, and what works for one organisation might be destructive inside another.

However, there was a common theme through the discussion; your team, the people who drive innovation, need two. The first is permission to innovate, to do something differently. We can stand on our soap box as often as we want, extolling our people to innovate, but if we don’t provide them with a mechanism to innovation then our efforts will be in vain. They need to have access to an organisational process which can take their good idea through to a deployed solution. Second, they need to be confident that their efforts will be recognised. Especially as their initial idea will be nurtured on their own time. Without these two in place, our well meaning innovation events and funky lunch room is a distraction from their day job, the job which their performance reviews depend on.

Overall it was a great event at a classy venue, and we look forward to the next InnoFuture Momentum event.