About us

Innovate Wisely was formed in 2020 by Lee Foster to help organisations utilise the framework she had developed from her research.  Lee was later joined by Joeri (Yuri) Timmermans (of BIGJUMP) and Carl Foster (of Big Carl software) as co-founders.

Both Lee and Joeri are engineers with post-graduate degrees and many years experience in engineering and project management. Joeri is also a Scrum Master and trained in Scale Agile SAFe.

 

Lee started engineering to help save the world. After 20 years of practice she became curious about innovation and wanted to find out why it was so hard to turn a great idea into reality. Lee discovered a missing link – knowledge. Lee is now on a crusade to share with the world what she has learned, so together we can all work towards fixing the planet.

 

Only through successful innovation, can we innovate for a better tomorrow.

 

What Lee learned from her research, at Queensland University of Technology, was that knowledge is an asset that can and should be managed. Less than 20% of organisations do this well. Lee also learned that knowledge has behaviours. The behaviours that affect innovation are Trust and Energy. Trust & Energy work together and can either support or block progress. If you don’t have Trust that your problem is worth solving or that the solution will work or management will provide the resources you need, then why should I provide my energy to make or to help make the change. Change is inherently difficult, so we need to make it easy.

 

Lee found from her research and practice that innovation is hard to manage and it often fails – 95% of product innovations fail. It is hard because it is not a linear process and it has, inherently, a lot of uncertainty which makes traditional ways of managing things, very difficult. So, an opportunity presented itself to me. What if we could manage innovation by addressing the uncertainty through managing knowledge and what if we could measure the behaviours to track progress?

 

Lee also learned from her practice, that there are plenty of ideation type processes around but not many that help you carry that idea through to full realisation within your organisation or community. So this is where InnoWise steps in.

 

Our clients (eg Melbourne Water, Holcim) are great at innovation – they strive to be innovative. But they didn’t have a framework to:
– guide them,
– ensure they were doing innovation in a consistent, systematic way
– provide measures that made sense for innovation.

 

We were able to show them how. We provided the framework and tools to help them find the road blocks that were slowing progress and gave them the tools to help plan the next steps in their innovations development.

 

Please reach out to learn more and to tell us about your innovation journey.

InnoWise™ is a knowledge-based framework that describes the relationship between innovation and knowledge. It is an evidence based framework designed to help managers of innovative initiatives, plan, strategise and manage with knowledge in mind.

InnoWise™ is different to other innovation or project management frameworks as it starts where ideation stops. It provides a systematic and comprehensive, easy to use process to implement your ideas.  It includes regular project health checks using behavioural based metrics. This approach provides an ‘early warning’ system for your initiative, allowing managers to reflect and adjust before time and money is wasted.


Lee has founded Innovate Wisely Pty Ltd to enable all organisations to benefit from InnoWise™.