Paul Egglestone

Innovation systems today are not suffering from a lack of motion.They are suffering from misdirection . Across Australia, the UK and the United States, innovation efforts are accelerating — more pilots, more R&D, more “transformation initiatives,” more technology adoption. Yet system-level outcomes in productivity, health, energy, care and education continue to lag. The paradox is now too visible to ignore: Innovation is happening.Progress is not. The problem is no longer invention or...

By the time innovation becomes visible in practice, something strange happens. There is no shortage of activity. No shortage of pilots. No shortage of ideas, evidence, or intent. What’s missing is connection. Across health, energy, education and social systems, innovation doesn’t fail because it can’t start — it fails because no-one is responsible for joining the dots once it’s underway. This is the coordination gap. And it is now one of the most expensive policy failures we have. From blind...

Most innovation systems fail in the same way: not because nothing is happening, but because the most consequential work doesn’t fit their field of vision. By the time innovation begins to change how systems actually operate — how care is delivered, how energy is governed, how education works — it often no longer looks like “innovation” at all. And when it stops looking like innovation, it stops being seen. A quick signpost — then we go deeper In the first two posts in this series, we showed...