Creating an ‘Innovation Economy’ will be an evolution, not a revolution
In this guest post Sam Court argues Australia’s bid to become an innovation hub will need a mindshift from everyone about what innovation really is.
If Australia truly wants to become a global hub for innovation, we need to not only look at funding mechanisms for high-risk start-ups, but also at giving better incentives for established brands to make calculated investments.
As our first leader to have an understanding of the impact of digital technology, Malcolm Turnbull’s recent succession to the Prime Ministerial throne seems to have reignited the public’s interest in the so called “innovation economy”. Clearly, Australia needs to do more than simply dig up our natural resources and send them overseas.
The media have continued to fuel this excitement, publishing countless interviews with start-up success stories like Atlassian, and with the up-and-coming occupants at incubation spaces like Fishburners. To be honest, it’s hard not to get excited; however, appreciating the distinction between innovation and invention is important.
Defining Innovation
Let’s be clear: Uber didn’t invent taxis. And they didn’t invent geo-location, ecommerce or customer reviews. What they did was identify pain-points in the process of getting from A to B, and then offered a better way of getting there. Real innovation is about understanding where customers are having poor experiences and creating better ones in their place.
The bulk of the innovative work in digital happens in small increments, and I think we should be shedding some light on that too. For example, by listening to their users and analysing the aggregate data, Atlassian are able to constantly improve products like Confluence & Jira. On a smaller scale, boutique design agencies like Melbourne-based Bravo are able to revolutionise the property settlement process for PEXA, just by understanding that the old-world paper process was frustratingly opaque for both buyers and sellers.
As a digital design veteran, I’ve always been sceptical of our industry’s fixation on how start-ups like Uber, AirBnB, and even Amazon innovated to create massive disruption. In my opinion, there are four key reasons why these references are largely irrelevant in the marketing world:
- Clients mostly brief for campaigns, not innovation. They generally don’t have the budget, timeframe, or risk appetite to really do anything new. Let’s not forget that Uber’s seed & angel investments totalled $1.5m, and have since raised $8.2B in venture capital!
- Even when clients do brief in search of innovation, they often struggle at getting the ideas to market. Many of the clients I’ve worked with have backlogs of innovative ideas, but are paralysed to implement them due to internal conflicts, constant reprioritisation, and an inability to quantify metrics for success.
- Agencies trying to push an innovation agenda mostly just want to noodle around with “cool tech” or make “Field of Dreams” apps as award entries, rather than for actual consumers to download and use.
- Brands often act superficially, aiming only for PR to promote themselves as being innovative.
Innovating on the Job
The modernisation challenges that the advertising industry faces are well documented. There are already a plethora of articles complaining about the state of the industry, how formulaic and slow it is, and why innovation is important for brands. It’s really easy to focus on how broken things often seem. Unfortunately, few people seem to publically explore ways we can improve.
So, at the risk of unearthing another mini-flame war in the comments thread, I wanted to share some practical advice.
The following steps outline the process we use at The White Agency to help our clients uncover and bridge gaps in user experience, with the ultimate goal of innovating:
1. Spend time understanding our client’s business, their specific goals, and the challenges they face.
2. Examine human psychology & explore behavioural economic concepts as they relate to the category our clients occupy.
3. Research people in the context of their interactions with the brand & dive into the wealth of quantitative data that’s typically available about our audience.
4. Synthesise our customer knowledge into personas that bring the audience to life, going way beyond simple demographic clichés.
5. Translate our insights into hypotheses in the form of design challenges that frame the problems.
6. Craft interactive experiences in the form of stories that demonstrate how the problems might be solved.
7. Execute experiments with the goal of gathering feedback.
8. Validate with real customers to ensure we’ve solved the problems we set out to, without creating any new ones.
Driving the Innovation Evolution
Obviously we can’t continue to rely on the wealth of our country’s mineral resources. Conversely, we shouldn’t expect Australia to magically become the next Silicon Valley. And even if we were that naïve, there are a thousand start-up failures for every disruptive success story.
As a nation, Australians are too focused on holding down a job and buying property. However, like start-ups, established brands need government-backed incentives to take measured risks. Brands can act like investors by demonstrating the commercial viability of their ideas as well as their ability, drive and commitment to achieving success.
Australia has progressively developed a culture of safety, where failure is intolerable. Thankfully, the political will is now there to drive the country’s innovation culture. I just hope that this enthusiasm extends to the sort of incremental innovation that agencies are already helping clients with today.
- Sam Court, UX Director at The White Agency
“Many of the clients I’ve worked with have backlogs of innovative ideas, but are paralysed to implement them due to internal conflicts, constant reprioritisation, and an inability to quantify metrics for success.”
And there it is. Very smart piece Sam.
User ID not verified.
I agree with the need for innovation. I also agree it’s a challenge for agencies to be part of this innovation. I wrote a story at the beginning of the year called Why are plumbers smarter than digital agencies.
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-plumbers-smarter-than-digital-agencies-simon-van-wyk?published=u
I think clients need to drive their own innovation. It might involve the agency but it’s very hard for an external vendor to be part of a “fail and learn” innovation cycle.
Also agree with the comment on Australian being too tied up with buying a house. I was just up at the top of WA. They don’t have the same issues and people are using their capital for all manner of interesting business innovations.
User ID not verified.
Mmmmm, what a tall drink of water that Sam Court is! I’m thirsty…
User ID not verified.
My dream is to have an article about innovation reference Australian start up’s that have overtaken the world. Companies like Atlassian are just the start.
The problem of implementing innovations is well known and can now be predicted. We have completed over 100 assessments of collaboration performance inside large organisations. This measure is a predictor of innovation performance. if a company does not collaborate then it finds it very difficult to implement innovation.
Allan
User ID not verified.
Agree that innovation is an imperative in the modern market. Having worked on innovation within large multinationals (& admittedly few ideas make it to market for various reasons – risk, budgetary or competing resource reasons being but a few), generally this innovation is contained in-house & the agency isn’t involved until the idea has been thoroughly tested & researched. There are a variety of reasons & how to remunerate an agency against an idea that may never launch is a big one. We all genuinely want to innovate, it is simply about trying to find a way to ensure that up-front costs don’t kill the idea before it even has a shot
User ID not verified.
I agree with your process.
Agencies aren’t able to give a client the same innovative power that an internal team working on a single product could, due to deadlines, budgets and resources. Perhaps unless they hired a team from the agency to work full time on that product.
We can however (and I’m guessing The White Agency already do, based on what I’m reading here), share with clients our creative processes and encourage them to use them for themselves. A client who is continuously driving their own innovation but needs your help to facilitate that is always an enjoyable client to work with!
User ID not verified.
@Allen Ryan
“We have completed over 100 assessments of collaboration performance inside large organisations. This measure is a predictor of innovation performance”.
Say wha?
User ID not verified.