How We Drive Change at Spark Interact

Here’s what we’ve learnt working with businesses across Sydney: everyone talks about innovation, but most organisations are stuck waiting for the “right time” to start. They’re waiting for bigger budgets, clearer strategies, or that perfect breakthrough idea. Meanwhile, their competitors are moving forward with what they have.

The real insight? Innovation isn’t about having all the answers upfront. It’s about having the courage to start where you are and build momentum through action. Through our experience at Spark Interact and observing successful organisations globally, we’ve discovered that the difference between innovative companies and stagnant ones isn’t resources or genius ideas — it’s their approach to getting started.

Rethinking What Innovation Actually Means

Here’s the thing about innovation that often gets lost in all the buzzwords and tech hype: it doesn’t have to be revolutionary. Innovation is simply doing something better than before. It’s the website redesign that suddenly makes customer journeys intuitive. It’s an automated note-taking tool that saves hours of manual work. It’s the small process change that removes a daily headache for your team.

At its core, innovation improves productivity, reduces friction, and makes work more meaningful. The best innovations often start with someone saying, “There’s got to be a better way to do this.”

Lessons from Our Own Journey

To understand how innovation moves from concept to reality, we examined our own transformation at Spark Interact. Three distinct patterns emerged, each offering practical insights for any organisation.

The Collaboration Revolution: Our Figma Story

Our shift from Adobe XD to Figma illustrates how operational changes can transform team dynamics. Previously, we were drowning in version control issues, sending files back and forth, dealing with conflicting feedback, and losing hours to “which version are we looking at?” conversations.

Marcela, who led this transition, explains the deeper insight: “It wasn’t just about switching tools. We realised our entire collaboration infrastructure was creating invisible friction. With Figma, there are no versions — everyone works on the same canvas. Client feedback happens in real-time. The cognitive load of file management just disappeared.”

Kath, our Creative Director, adds: “I’d invested years mastering XD, so switching felt risky. But Figma fundamentally changed how we think about design. We now design in systems, not static pages. Our entire digital workflow runs through it, and the efficiency gain has been remarkable.”

The real impact? Design iterations that took days now take hours. Client approval cycles shortened dramatically. Version control errors — which used to cause weekly headaches — completely disappeared.

Building Our Own Tools: The Power of Custom Solutions

We discovered that off-the-shelf solutions often solve general problems but create specific headaches. So Roshan, our technical lead, built tools tailored to our exact needs:

A centralised dashboard for website management — Instead of logging into dozens of different systems to check on client sites, we now have one view that shows everything. This transformed reactive firefighting into proactive maintenance.

Direct Miro feedback integration — Previously, giving feedback meant taking screenshots, uploading them somewhere, annotating them, then sharing links. Now it’s one click. Multiply that saved time across hundreds of feedback cycles monthly, and the impact is substantial.

A responsive design calculator — This ensures pixel-perfect layouts across all devices, eliminating the back-and-forth of responsive design testing.

The lesson: when existing tools create friction, sometimes the innovation isn’t finding a better tool — it’s building exactly what you need.

The Automation Transformation: Eliminating Manual Overhead

Our most impactful change involved automating our lead management process. Previously, every form submission triggered a manual chain: receive form, enter data, update CRM, check source, send response, schedule follow-up, assign tasks. Each lead required multiple touchpoints and significant time.

We implemented n8n automation that now handles all of this intelligently. Forms flow automatically into Pipedrive with complete tracking data. Personalised email sequences trigger based on lead characteristics. Tasks are distributed according to team availability.

The result? We eliminated almost all manual processing, gained complete visibility on lead sources and ROI, and maintained consistent communication with prospects. More importantly, our team now focuses on meaningful work instead of data entry.

What We Can Learn from Global Innovation Leaders

Looking beyond our walls, we’ve observed fascinating approaches to fostering innovation across different industries.

Basecamp’s Shape Up Model

Basecamp uses a unique “Shape Up” methodology with six-week work cycles followed by a two-week cool-down period. During the cool-down, teams deal with bugs, write up their work, and plan what to tackle next. What makes this innovative is that every six weeks, they hold a “betting table” where leadership reviews carefully shaped project pitches and decides which ones to commit to. This creates regular opportunities for new ideas to be considered and implemented. Teams get uninterrupted time to build meaningful features, and the structured approach has led to many of their most successful product innovations.

Toyota’s Kaizen System

Toyota’s kaizen philosophy embodies continuous improvement at every level. Every employee — from assembly line workers to executives — is expected to identify problems and suggest improvements daily. At Toyota, the absence of reported problems is actually seen as a red flag, because it means people aren’t looking closely enough.

What makes their system work is that suggestions aren’t just collected in a box somewhere — they’re actively reviewed, and workers see their ideas implemented quickly. One example: when workers suggested simple tool rack modifications or special mats to stand on, Toyota implemented these changes immediately. Small improvements like saving seconds per task compound into massive efficiency gains over time. Workers can even stop the production line when they spot quality issues, emphasising that getting it right matters more than speed.

Blickblock’s Industry Evolution

Our client Blickblock spent decades in mining before identifying a critical safety gap. They developed a solution that’s now transforming construction sites globally. Their journey (detailed in our case study) shows how deep industry knowledge combined with fresh thinking creates breakthrough innovations.

Creating Your Innovation Framework

Innovation can emerge from anyone who cares enough about improving current systems and workflows. But without the right environment, even the best ideas wither. History is littered with companies that rested on their laurels — Kodak ignored digital photography despite inventing it, Nokia dismissed touchscreen phones, Blockbuster laughed off streaming services, and Blackberry couldn’t imagine a world beyond physical keyboards. These giants fell not because they lacked resources, but because they suppressed the very innovations that could have saved them.

So how do you build innovation into your organisational DNA?

Start with Three Core Principles

1. Permission to Experiment Create psychological safety where failure isn’t punished but seen as learning. When teams know they can try new approaches without career consequences, innovation flourishes.

2. Resources Follow Ideas Don’t ask people to innovate in their spare time. Allocate actual resources — time, budget, and support — to test promising ideas. Even small investments signal that innovation matters.

3. Recognition Over Hierarchy Good ideas don’t respect org charts. The intern might spot what the CEO misses. Create channels where ideas are evaluated on merit, not source.

Build Your Innovation Process

Here’s the framework we’ve refined through experience:

Weekly Innovation Touchpoints: Dedicate 15 minutes in team meetings to “better way” discussions. Someone shares a friction point, others suggest solutions. Keep it informal but consistent.

Reduce Submission Friction: Forget complex innovation portals. Use simple tools — a shared document, a Slack channel, even a physical suggestion box. The easier it is to share ideas, the more ideas you’ll get.

Foster Cross-Pollination: Encourage people from different departments to collaborate. Our best innovations often come from fresh eyes on old problems. Designers spot development inefficiencies. Developers suggest creative solutions.

Prototype and Measure: Turn promising ideas into small experiments. Set clear success metrics. Not every innovation will work, but you’ll learn from each attempt.

Share and Scale: When something works, celebrate it. Share the story. Help other teams adapt it. Innovation spreads through stories, not policies.

The Innovation Mindset

Innovation isn’t a department or a quarterly initiative — it’s a mindset that asks “what if?” instead of accepting “that’s how we’ve always done it.” It’s about creating space for curiosity, supporting experimentation, and understanding that today’s small improvement might be tomorrow’s competitive advantage.

At Spark Interact, we’ve learnt that innovation happens when you combine three elements: people who care about problems, permission to try solutions, and processes that capture and nurture ideas. You don’t need Silicon Valley budgets or dedicated innovation labs. You need a culture that values better over perfect, action over analysis paralysis, and learning over being right.

The organisations that thrive in the next decade won’t be those with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tech. They’ll be the ones that tap into their collective intelligence, act on good ideas regardless of where they originate, and maintain the courage to change even when the current way is working.

Because here’s the truth about innovation: it’s already happening in your organisation. The question is whether you’re creating the conditions for it to flourish or letting it fade away in the noise of “business as usual.”

At Spark Interact, we help organisations translate innovative ideas into market-ready realities. Through strategic positioning, capability development, and digital transformation, we bridge the gap between vision and execution.