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June 11, 2025
Ideas are the lifeblood of progress – sparking innovation, driving change and laying the foundation for competitive advantage.
Whether incremental improvements or disruptive breakthroughs, new concepts represent untapped potential – a vision of what could be.
Today, the ability to generate fresh thinking is a critical asset. It fuels growth, inspires teams and keeps organisations relevant.
Yet most great ideas are left on the cutting room floor – that inevitable graveyard housing the remaining droplets of a burst thought bubble.
If the gap between idea and implementation is in fact widening, what methods are Australian businesses deploying to maximise light bulb moments?
“Let’s start by understanding that an idea is an awesome opportunity to connect across your organisation,” observed Nick Munro, Head of Innovation and Fintech, AI Product Owner at Westpac.
“Collect those ideas, make sure people feel heard and that they’ve got buy-in throughout the process. But also be transparent about how you’re going to take those ideas forward in terms of triaging them and reaching a point of value.”
Munro outlined that AI is “ultimately a team sport” with that initial fusion of cross-company ideas crucial to future project success.
“But that doesn’t mean you can deliver AI in technology and expect to deliver value,” he cautioned. “The idea is an opportunity but the key step is arriving at the right idea and moving that to execution in a meaningful way for your business and your customers.”
Central to that is a solid understanding of the opportunities available, the mechanisms of delivery and the core priorities underpinning everything. And once that understanding is reached, be articulate when outlining the process and progress.
“An idea without implementation is like having a seed that you haven’t planted,” shared Philippa Garner, Head of Data and Analytics at Life Without Barriers.
“You can get people to rally around an idea but you need to show what the future looks like with this idea in reality to ensure buy-in. People need to see how the opportunity impacts them whether positively or negatively – living and breathing it to feel what this new future might look like.”
For Garner, this is where most businesses get stuck however.
“There are certain visionaries who are able to see the future on the back of an idea and other people in the room who need a little more hand holding to be able to walk through what an idea does to process or what that it does to people,” Garner explained.
“People may also require different forms of media to engage with to understand this future. Some get the big picture very quickly while others still can’t see the vision even on the day that a live product is implemented – it might take months for that realisation to come.”
Drawing from experience, Ramesh Raghavan – Head of Digital, Innovation and Experience at Uniting – stressed the importance of “context” in initially evaluating the long-term potential of an idea within an organisation.
The deeper point is that ideas aren’t in short supply but it’s the ability to link back to the corporate vision in a tangible way that separates enthusiasm from execution.
“There is often a plethora of ideas but if we were to implement each and every idea, we’d go down a ditch pretty quickly as an organisation,” Raghavan noted.
“Hence why context is so crucial. The success of an idea isn’t in the implementation but creating a pathway to move forward in a way that best suits the need of the business.”
Munro, Garner and Raghavan joined forces on stage to debate Idea to Implementation at Moxie Authority 2025 in Sydney.
Aligned to the theme of Inspired Knowledge, this inaugural and invite-only conference housed the most influential figures setting the market agenda in business and technology across Australia.
More than 400 industry front-runners were in attendance spanning all ends of the ecosystem, from CIOs, CTOs and CISOs to CDOs, CEOs and Founders.
Chasing ideas, reaching ‘no brainer’ status
In many organisations, a persistent gap exists between the generation of ideas and their successful implementation.
While creativity and innovation are highly valued, translating a great concept into tangible results often proves challenging. This disconnect is typically due to structural, cultural or operational barriers.
In some instances, a lack of clear ownership or accountability can result in promising ideas stalling in the pipeline. Bureaucratic processes, risk-averse mindsets and siloed teams can further obstruct progress, turning energy and ambition into inertia.
Sometimes however, it just takes a little dose of courage and persistence to move the needle.
“Let me give you an example,” Raghavan detailed.
“Almost two years ago, the clinical practice head at Uniting had seen augmented reality glasses and raised the idea of using them for telehealth purposes.
“The product was run with software from TeamViewer which allowed remote collaboration with specialists and the initial thought was that nurses in remote Australia could use them and specialists could just dial in to make assessments.”
Met with company-wide resistance – due to concerns that this was nothing more than a “gimmicky idea” – the proposal succumbed to little support or buy-in.
In response, a partnership was formed with Raghavan to secure a “small and basic” budget amount to explore the possibility of overhauling remote care.
“We ran a trial for six weeks with a small amount of funds and kept it among a small group at the early stage,” Raghavan recalled. “We realised the ROI benefits and calculated that we saved 250 hours of travel for our clinical practitioners per week and avoided nine hospitalisations with those glasses.
“Each hospitalisation costs around $21,000 to the government so when we started collating the data and presented back to the director, the feedback was that this was a ‘no brainer’. It was $7000 for each pair of glasses which was expensive but the investment paid off within the first month.
“Now, we use it across 24 sites in Australia and it’s completely funded by the government through a telehealth grant.”
The lesson learned by Raghavan was that ideas not only require boldness to succeed but a healthy dose of unconventional thinking powered by strong early pace to create momentum.
“If you’re not bold then you’ll end up waiting for everyone to be aligned and even if they eventually do jump on-board, the idea could quickly become stale,” he added.
Arriving at the coveted ‘no brainer’ status also calls for a stronger emphasis on executional discipline, shaped by ‘big picture’ thinking. This includes developing processes that prioritise and fast-track viable ideas, empowering change agents and fostering a culture where experimentation is supported.
“If I use Westpac as an example,” Munro shared. “We’re a large organisation housing lots of different divisions that each do slightly different things. But there’s also elements of commonality.”
Take contact centres as a case in point, which run in consumer, business and wealth divisions. Although the products offered are different – and the customers served are different – crossover does still exist from an underlying capabilities standpoint.
“The ability of a banker to answer a phone call when a customer comes through doesn’t require a custom component – you wouldn’t make that available to one division but not the other,” Munro expanded.
“That would be inefficient if the capability can be leveraged by other teams. If you take an idea or concept, the first step is to think strategically and assess how this could add value elsewhere.
“Is there an opportunity to create greater value by expanding on this or even setting it up as a reusable service?”
Munro cited insights shared by Devesh Maheshwari, CTO of Lendi Group who headlined Moxie Authority 2025.
As outlined in his analytical session – Lights On? Light a Spark? – Maheshwari emphasised the importance of not thinking about an idea, rather thinking about a system.
“At Westpac, we’re thinking about the system,” Munro added.
“How do you create those common capabilities and make them reusable and repeatable? We don’t want to have a fleet of 1000 chatbots across the business, all running on entirely different platforms with slightly different ways of operating.”
According to Moxie Research, 84% of Australian businesses are currently running internal AI working groups to shape strategy and drive adoption.
While progress varies based on maturity, the key benefits of cross-collaboration between business units is to primarily drive efficiency and process optimisation (59%).
This is alongside creating innovation and a competitive edge (51%), plus enhancing customer experience (50%) and kick-starting change management and integration processes (49%).
“You have to take people who have different visions and different ideas on that journey,” Munro said. “It requires very strong sponsorship to get to the right point and never lose sight of that – it’s a cross-functional team.”
Execution requires more than just enthusiasm
When pressed to share the most debilitating problems that plague implementation efforts across organisations, Munro was clear:
Delving deeper, Munro tackled the first roadblock. This is centred around the misguided belief from executives that single idea ownership yields success.
In other words, ‘I’ve got an idea and I’m going to deliver it and take it the whole way through on my own. I’m going to keep it very tight and close to my chest’.
“Put it this way,” Munro advised. “If I want to build a house, I know how many bedrooms I want and can even design it conceptually in my head. But I’m not an architect and probably should get a professional to do it.
“That same professional – the architect – is probably the wrong person to build the house. They’ll probably need to give the plans to a builder to construct.”
Now take that analogy and apply it to an enterprise context, Munro told an audience of 400 technology and business executives.
“Trying to take an individual idea, bring it to life and deliver value is very difficult to achieve on my own,” he cautioned.
The second blocker is more related to technology, notably the tendency to deploy new tools without a clear business case or problem.
“Let’s use GenAI given that everyone understands it,” Munro added.
“Searching for something to use GenAI for because it’s fun and cool is the wrong approach. Start with the problem and then find the best way to solve it, which may or may not be the use of that particular technology solution.”
Switching industries to not-for-profit, Garner articulated the value of creating “excellent synergy” among delivery teams through subject matter experts who “fully believe” in the outcome of a program.
“Where we saw less success – and had to really fight to keep the program alive – was when there was a very strong technology solution or clear use case for digital or AI but it lacked the business support,” Garner recalled.
“Either because the subject matter expert didn’t have capacity, wasn’t able to prioritise or didn’t believe the technology solution was the right approach.”
In those scenarios, people skills trump any form of technology expertise or business acumen.
“You can sort of push that to a certain extent and sometimes you can convince people along the way but you usually have a high likelihood of failing if the business buy-in isn’t there early on,” Garner acknowledged.
“You need a champion who is willing to own the solution once it’s deployed and out in the wild while also understanding that the modern delivery of technology is iterative and agile.”
This is “groundbreaking stuff” for traditional businesses unaccustomed to the fast-paced and ever-evolving nature of new technology deployment. Gone are the days of rolling out a product and reverting back in 3-5 years once the refresh cycle comes back around.
“Yes, small wins do sometimes get people across the line but until you can say that a business figure is willing to take the lead on this change, then you’re going to fail,” Garner cautioned.
Managing people, building credibility
Leaders play a critical role in ensuring ideas don’t die in a backlog but instead are nurtured, tested and scaled. Without this focus, organisations risk becoming idea-rich but outcome-poor – full of potential, but short on progress or synergy.
“Stakeholder management is 99% of my job,” Garner outlined.
“When dealing with very difficult stakeholders or really excellent stakeholders – and managing that full spectrum of people – you need to recognise where those people sit on the spectrum before you actually start to jump in and have conversations.”
Life Without Barriers is a not-for-profit organisation that delivers services in more than 300 communities across Australia.
Garner’s career has encompassed roles in transformation, AI, advanced analytics, supply chain and commercial sectors. Deep expertise also lies in leveraging data-driven strategies to drive organisational growth and efficiency.
“Prior to this role I worked at one company for 17 yeas and what comes with this is a whole heap of social capital and a deep understanding of core business drivers,” Garner said.
During this time, Garner moved into an analytics role with in-built knowledge of how the business works which meant convincing “almost any person in the room” became easier – from the pain points that affected frontline workers to the back office.
“There is a credibility credit box that you need to tick, absolutely,” Garner accepted. “But you also need the skills to manage stakeholders and that’s regardless of what type of role you have.”
In a direct message to 400 executives in the room, Garner acknowledged that countless terminologies, playbooks and checklists already exist on this very topic.
Select any consulting firm in Sydney, Melbourne or Brisbane and they’ll show the pathway ahead to take an idea to implementation. The market isn’t short on advice.
“But the challenge lies in figuring out how to tailor that to your very specific business needs,” Garner expanded. “Every business has its own culture and some methodologies will either work very well or not translate at all.
“My advice is to fund a couple of people in the business who understand or have taken something through to success and extract what worked well. From that, create your own path from idea to implementation.”
Building on Garner’s advice, Munro also accepted that no organisation is perfect and the path to the promised land of full-scale usage and deployment is fraught with challenges along the way.
“So, listen to the people who’s been through that process and ask about the pain points,” he recommended. “What was harder than you expected? Take that feedback and work on fixing it before letting the next process go through and iterating again.
“These are very important steps because if you can reduce time to value, then you’re going to have more people engaged but most importantly, more value coming into your business.”
In a final takeaway, Raghavan summarised that as the flow of ideas evolve, so should how executives approach the aftermath of brainstorming and thought processes.
“Ideas have morphed into a six-lane highway which is heading towards a two-lane highway,” he explained.
“What does that mean? It means as organisations, we have to quickly have a model in place to either reject, approve or run ideas because if we don’t, we’ll fall behind and someone else will take our lunch away.”
Moxie Authority 2025 housed the most influential figures redefining business and technology across Australia. This inaugural and invite-only conference in Sydney hosted more than 400 industry front-runners spanning all ends of the ecosystem, from CEOs, CIOs and CTOs to CDOs, CISOs and Founders.
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