For the past three years I have dedicated my life towards the exploration of innovation in the enterprise.

Having come from a background in consulting and banking, I know very well how the nature of large organisations, be it politics, processes and policies, values and culture, infrastructure or all of the above can not just inhibit but suffocate a company and its people’s ability to move, tap into their creative right brains and successfully innovate - that is, to not only extend a company’s existing S-curve but more importantly, to capture the next S-curve, in order to stay competitive and relevant in an era of rapid change and disruption to industry incumbents.

While I worked in risk management for a large investment bank, I took it upon myself to make a number of suggestions to the Director of my division, who although took the time to hear me out, had no appetite in doing anything that didn’t align with his core competencies and anything that messed with the status quo. Basically, I suggested in mid-2013 that we, as an investment bank, could be better making use of data analytics platforms and tools such as Hadoop and R programming language in order to uncover hidden insights that can help us not only better perform our forensic-esque jobs in risk management but also extend to better marketing decisions in the actual business.

The response? “Oh, we’ve got Mark. He’s really good with Excel.” This is a company that registered over one billion dollars profit in 2015 and has more than 10,000 employees worldwide.

Shortly thereafter I was fortunate enough to begin my life in entrepreneurship, having successful raised in the low six figures to build my first web startup, Hotdesk, an office sharing platform targeting startups, which evolved into Collective Campus, an innovation hub, school and consultancy based in Melbourne, Australia that works with both large organisations and startups to help them adopt the mindset, methodologies and tools to successfully explore new business models and disruptive innovation in an era of rapid change (“nailed it!”).

I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with, worked for, given keynote talks at and helped companies such as Ernst & Young, KPMG Innovate, Macquarie Bank, Westpac, Dun & Bradstreet, King & Wood Mallesons, Sportsbet, NAB, Telstra, the Department of Defence, Microsoft and CapGemini at the top end of town and been involved in varying capacities with startups such as Noots, Coinjar, Drawboard, Rotorgeek, Parent Paperwork and Jobbop in the world of tech startups. Most recently, I was invited to be an advisory board member at the Australian Government backed AgInnovation initiative - developed to help accelerate Australian agtech which has long been touted as the ‘food bowl of Asia’.