On Wednesday 29th August as part of the Groundswell Festival of Innovation, the BWN hosted a lunchtime panel discussion at KPMG with Liz Maguire – Head of Digital and Transformation at ANZ, Anna Connell – Digital Creative & Strategist, Columnist, Commentator and Writer, and Jodie Tipping – Founder and Chair of Cucumber. Jenny Rudd from UNO was MC for the event, putting some great questions forward to the panel to uncover their experience around innovation and trends they were seeing in the industry.

Anna shared how there seemed to be a slowdown in the introduction of new technologies, as no longer was it a race around who could come up with something new first. Instead there is now more care being taken to better understand how new technology can make the world a better place before it is released.

Liz Maguire gave some great insights around things she had learnt in terms of bringing new applications to the market. She said that when it came to testing the market for a new product, it was important to look at how clients were going use it and where they were going to be when using it. One of her key learnings had been that it was better just to watch how people use a new application rather than explain to them how to use it, as their interpretation may be quite different to your original expectations.

Jodie expanded on this by sharing how they were approached by a new client to develop a new application. On completion of the project, they were then able to look at how they could use this innovation to expand on their service offerings to their existing client base.

It was great to hear from the panel in regard to the traits they saw in innovative people that made them successful:

• Jodie said it was important to be open and to have the ability to look at things from a different perspective.
• Anna said it was to have the ability to constantly learn and to know how to learn, as she said we all have the ability to find out anything online. She related this to her own experience when on numerous occasions she had said “yes” she could do something and then googled how to do it!!
• For Liz it was to have a grow mindset, being tenacious and curious and being blinding optimistic – don’t doubt yourself.

Innovation, they all agreed, could be applied to any industry or service as we all needed to step up and make change. It was a great event and we all left feeling inspired about the work these women were doing and encouraged to think about what innovative changes we could make in our lives!