Innovation Festival–My privilege to help kick-off

Just now I got back from doing the keynote speech for the Innovation Festival that will run over the next month in the North Coast area of New South Wales.

As usual I tried to make the talk about the audience and not just Ric pushing one of his pet agenda’s and it seemed to work well. We explored two areas around innovation:

1. Answering the question “What is innovation?” and;
2. For maximum innovation how important it is to do what you do best and find team mates and partners who compliment your strengths to bring maximum impact to your innovations.

In one interesting section of the talk I asked the audience to tell us about the top two problems they have in their business… I was really surprised to find that many of the answers showed that people were really actively solving problems for their businesses and most were really clued in on how to get solutions.

One lady taught health and safety using mannequins to simulate CPR as she travelled around Australia and her biggest issue was the size and bulkiness of the mannequins. The audience actually shared in solving her problem by exploring ways to break mannequins down into a small a package as possible and making them portable… I think we even invented something on the spot!

That's just one example of the open, free thinking environment that was shared at the event.