Amantha Imber

I met with the head of innovation at a large manufacturing company last week. She had requested a meeting to get some help with her company’s innovation program. I began by asking the innovation head about her company’s current approach. She excitedly told me about how her team had recently put in place an online […]

I largely abandoned paper notebooks a long time ago, despite being someone that has an unhealthy love of stationary shops. I travel a lot, so anything that adds weight to my bad needs to justify its space. Given I take all my notes on Evernote, I felt that bringing a notebook with me was redundant. […]

What do Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Pablo Picasso have in common? They are all thought of as born innovators. Creative geniuses. The myths and stories surrounding these three people support the notion that one is either born an innovator… or not. And if not, perhaps consider a career in accounting. (That’s a joke – […]

The average manager’s workday is divided into one hour blocks. This is not due to humans naturally working best in one hour increments but because meetings, those seemingly necessary events that seem to dominate the days of office workers everywhere, tend to be scheduled in one hour blocks. Diaries covered in meetings have become so […]

I spent all of last week travelling around Australia with one of my clients. She heads up innovation at a top tier law firm and I’d been brought in to deliver innovation keynotes at all of the firm’s offices. In one of our taxi rides, the conversation turned to email. She told me she gets […]

Does your business have a culture in which innovation thrives? Are people challenging the status quo and being encouraged by leaders to take risks in pursuit of innovation? Or is the opposite true, whereby people don’t take time to listen to new ideas and suggestions? Building a culture of innovation is hard work. However, the […]

Australia’s most innovative companies are not just innovating for their external customers, they’re also innovating for their internal ones – their staff. Refusing to be like the plumber with the leaky taps, they are turning their innovation efforts inwards. The Australian Financial Review’s 2016 Most Innovative Companies list features groundbreaking innovations ranging from: a courier service that owns […]

Innovation strategy is an elusive concept to many businesses. People talk a lot about it but fail to actually commit to harnessing their innovation efforts into specific areas of focus. Instead, “blue sky” brainstorms are held where any idea is a good idea, and innovation fails to be deliberately focused around anything. Innovating in this […]

Imagine you work as a developer for Etsy. In case you haven’t heard of Etsy, it is a marketplace where people around the world connect, both online and offline, to make, sell and buy unique goods. It has 1.5 million sellers, almost 22 million active buyers, and in 2014 it had gross merchandise sales of […]