3 minute read
Meet the judges of this year’s PropertyX Innovate Awards
Nominations are in for this year’s fourth annual PropertyX Innovate Awards, which celebrate influential businesses across the sector – including legal practitioners, panel law firms, developers, financial institutions and industry partners.
Adjudicating the submissions is an esteemed panel of innovative leaders, with significant experience across a range of industries.
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We spoke to each of our judges to learn what innovation means to them and garner their expert advice on how to introduce this thinking within your business.
Kylie Davis, Founder & President, Proptech Association Australia
“My approach to innovation is to understand what a truly amazing client experience looks like, to map that out within the business and identify the roadblocks preventing us from delivering that. There are three elements in my view:
• Pain: there needs to be a problem you’re trying to solve – and it needs to be stronger than your customer’s ability to resist the pain.
• Solutions: it’s all about creating a fix.
• Persistence: as much as we all love unicorns, it takes blood, sweat, tears and time to achieve our goals.”
Karen Finch, CEO of Legally Yours, Vice President of the Australian Legal Tech Association
“Casting an eye to my domain, I think that innovation is going to be the driving force behind creating greater accessibility to legal services – both pro-bono and in paid work. In turn, more lawyers will live a healthier and more sustainable life having shifted away from billable hours. In simple terms, innovation is about shifting from ‘yes, but…’ to ‘yes, and…’ and removing those barriers.”
Ayala Domani, General Manager, Future Business, AGL
“Innovation is either incremental or disruptive. Incremental innovation happens everywhere in the organisation – it can be optimisation, process improvement, or enhancing user experience. On the other hand, disruptive innovation typically requires a dedicated focus and specialised resources that generally results in the creation of new businesses rather than new features or products. To me, it’s all about identifying those pain points and conceptualising how we can make it easier for our customers to do something.”
Ben Ross, Co-Founder, Propel Ventures
“People can overestimate what is required to get innovation out to market. I look at these concepts as either a hop, skip or a jump. A lot of people think about innovation as something sizeable or far advanced – like robotics, artificial intelligence or machine learning.” That would be a ‘jump’, but innovation exists even in the smallest things with organisations – and those ‘hops’ and ‘skips’ are just as important and can deliver great value both internally and externally.”
Tom Dreyfus, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer, Josef
“Innovation is about listening to your customers. When we listen to their feedback and understand the problems they’re trying to solve, it enables us to best understand how to innovate. There’s always a temptation to rely on your intuition, but when you do this, you’re only really listening to yourself and your internal drivers. The best solutions stem from ideas shared by your customers.”
Geoff Rohrsheim, Co-Founder, Hatch Creations
“It’s really important that any business at any stage of life is considering innovation. We’re seeing so much change at the moment because increasingly, the consumer is at the centre. Machine learning and AI used to be too expensive for most people to take advantage of, but now you can rent those services from cloud providers and use them to look at your data to come up with usable insights. It’s very early days of this kind of tech, but we’re probably going to see more of that appearing, because it’s no longer just the realm of the big guys.”
James Foster, Chief Executive Officer, Ezypay
“We see partnerships as being fundamentally critical to driving innovation. They really allow innovative capabilities to be progressed through large players who can help generate change. Everything that exists today was at one stage a piece of innovation - even basic things, like direct debit, we take for granted as being obvious now. At its heart, it’s not about building something and hoping people will use the product or service, it’s about seeking out issues and solving them.”
