# Why Your Company's Innovation Process is Broken (And How to Fix It Without the Corporate BS) **Related Reading:** [More Insight](https://skillcoaching.bigcartel.com/blog) | [Further Reading](https://trainingedge.bigcartel.com/blog) | [Additional Resources](https://educationguide.bigcartel.com/blog) Three weeks ago, I watched a marketing director present their "revolutionary innovation framework" to a room full of executives. Forty-seven slides. Fourteen acronyms. Zero actionable ideas. The whole thing felt like watching someone perform surgery with a sledgehammer whilst wearing oven mitts. I've been consulting with Australian businesses for the better part of fifteen years now, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that 73% of corporate innovation processes are elaborate theatre designed to make executives feel progressive while ensuring nothing actually changes. It's innovation kabuki - all the movements, none of the meaning. **The Sacred Cow Nobody Wants to Slaughter** Here's what's really happening in your innovation meetings. Someone mentions "design thinking" and suddenly everyone's nodding like they're at a religious service. You've got your sticky notes, your journey maps, your personas with names like "Busy Barbara" and "Tech-Savvy Trevor." You spend three days brainstorming solutions to problems your customers never actually said they had. Meanwhile, the real innovations in your industry are happening in somebody's garage in Geelong or a co-working space in Surry Hills. They're not following your process. They're certainly not filling out innovation request forms in triplicate. I worked with a Perth-based logistics company last year that had a 47-step innovation approval process. Forty-seven steps! To suggest we maybe update our delivery tracking system. The form alone took longer to complete than implementing the actual solution would have taken. [More information here](https://www.alkhazana.net/2025/07/16/why-firms-ought-to-invest-in-professional-development-courses-for-employees/) about how bureaucracy kills creativity faster than you can say "let's circle back on this." **The Brainstorming Delusion** Let me share something that might ruffle some feathers: group brainstorming is largely useless. There, I said it. Before you start typing angry emails, hear me out. The research has been clear for decades - people generate more and better ideas when they work alone first, then come together to build on each other's work. But we keep cramming everyone into conference rooms with whiteboards because it feels more collaborative. It feels more innovative. The problem with traditional brainstorming is that it's dominated by the loudest voices, constrained by groupthink, and filtered through whatever cognitive biases happen to be floating around the room that day. You end up with the illusion of innovation without any of the substance. **What Actually Works (Spoiler: It's Simpler Than You Think)** Real innovation isn't about having better processes. It's about creating conditions where good ideas can actually surface and survive. First, stop asking "How might we innovate?" and start asking "What's frustrating our customers that we're pretending isn't a problem?" I guarantee you'll get more useful insights from thirty minutes of customer service call recordings than from thirty days of innovation workshops. Second, give people permission to fail small and often. Most innovation processes are designed to prevent failure, which is like trying to learn to swim whilst wearing a life jacket, water wings, and staying firmly planted on dry land. [Here is the source](https://ethiofarmers.com/why-professional-development-courses-are-essential-for-career-growth/) for some fascinating research on learning through controlled failure. Third - and this is crucial - innovation needs constraints, not endless possibilities. When you tell someone they can do anything, they'll do nothing. When you give them three specific problems to solve with a limited budget and a tight deadline, magic happens. I learned this the hard way during my corporate days. We had unlimited "innovation time" and achieved precisely nothing with it. **The Melbourne Café Test** Here's my favourite test for whether an innovation is actually innovative: Could you explain it to someone in a Melbourne café without using any corporate jargon whatsoever? If you can't describe your innovation using normal human words that a barista would understand, it's probably not actually solving a real problem. It's solving a corporate problem, which is different entirely. Take artificial intelligence. Everyone's innovating with AI these days. Except most of what I see isn't innovation - it's automation wearing a fancy costume. True AI innovation would be using machine learning to predict which customers are about to become frustrated before they even realise it themselves. That's the kind of thing you could explain over a flat white without PowerPoint slides. **The Budget Reality Check** Here's something nobody talks about in innovation circles: most breakthrough innovations happen despite corporate budgets, not because of them. [Personal recommendations](https://sewazoom.com/the-role-of-professional-development-courses-in-a-changing-job-market/) suggest that the best innovations often come from teams working around budget constraints rather than with unlimited resources. I've seen companies spend $200,000 on innovation consultants to tell them what their front-line staff could have explained for the price of a pizza lunch. The expensive consultants delivered a beautifully formatted report recommending exactly what the warehouse manager suggested six months earlier in a two-paragraph email that got ignored. This isn't about being anti-consultant (I am one, after all). It's about recognising that innovation insights often already exist within your organisation. They're just buried under layers of hierarchy and process. **The Real Killers of Innovation** Innovation doesn't die from lack of ideas. It dies from what I call the "committee of no" - that collection of middle managers whose primary job seems to be finding reasons why new ideas won't work. You know these people. They're the ones who respond to every suggestion with "yes, but have you considered..." followed by seventeen potential problems that might theoretically occur in highly unlikely scenarios. They're not necessarily bad people. They're just operating in systems that reward risk avoidance over risk-taking. The other innovation killer? [More details at the website](https://croptech.com.sa/why-companies-ought-to-invest-in-professional-development-courses-for-employees/) explains how perfectionism disguised as quality control can strangle good ideas in their cribs. If your innovation process requires ideas to be fully formed before they're allowed to breathe, you're not innovating. You're manufacturing. **What Your Customers Actually Want** Here's a radical thought: maybe we should ask our customers what they want instead of assuming we know. Revolutionary concept, I know. But here's the twist - don't ask them what they want. Ask them what frustrates them. Ask them what they wish worked differently. Ask them about the workarounds they've created because your current solution doesn't quite fit their needs. I worked with a Brisbane-based software company that spent eighteen months building features nobody asked for whilst ignoring the simple integration their biggest clients had been requesting for years. When we finally delivered that integration, their renewal rate jumped 34%. Sometimes innovation is just paying attention. **The Innovation Pipeline Problem** Most companies treat innovation like a pipeline - ideas go in one end, products come out the other. Linear. Predictable. Completely divorced from how innovation actually works in the real world. Real innovation is messy. It's cyclical. Ideas get abandoned and then rediscovered. Solutions emerge for problems you didn't know you had. The breakthrough comes from combining two completely unrelated concepts whilst you're thinking about something else entirely. [Further information here](https://diekfzgutachterwestfalen.de/why-professional-development-courses-are-essential-for-career-growth/) shows how the most successful innovators treat the process more like gardening than manufacturing. You plant seeds, create good conditions, and see what grows. You can't schedule insight for Thursday afternoon between budget reviews and team meetings. **Starting Over (Without Actually Starting Over)** If you're reading this and recognising your own company's innovation theatre, don't despair. You don't need to burn everything down and start from scratch. You just need to stop pretending that process equals progress. Start small. Pick one genuine customer problem. Give one person permission to solve it however they see fit. Set a deadline. Get out of their way. See what happens. Most importantly, measure results, not process. I don't care how many innovation workshops you've conducted or how comprehensive your idea management system is. I care whether your customers' lives got better because of something your company did differently. Innovation isn't about having better meetings about innovation. It's about making things that work better than they worked before. Everything else is just expensive procrastination with fancy notebooks. The good news? Once you stop doing innovation theatre and start doing actual innovation, your customers will notice. Your competitors will notice. And your accountant will definitely notice. Your innovation process isn't broken because you're not following the right methodology. It's broken because you're following any methodology at all instead of just solving real problems for real people. Now stop reading articles about innovation and go innovate something.