In one weekend, a room full of seven-year-olds can dream up a new retail product, design it, work out how to take it to market and mock up a social media presence.

"It's cool, right?" says Vanessa Garrard, chief executive and founder of Queensland based E3 Style, a company that develops consumer products for retailers.

"They won't be able to run a business, but the idea is that in one weekend they can go and create a new product."

She tells the story to illustrate how important education is for creating innovators, and to encourage entrepreneurial thinking.

The relatively small community of entrepreneurs in Australia means that innovation still tends towards being a buzzword rather than a means of driving development.

"There are very few companies in Australia that innovate," Ms Garrard says. "We need to support each other more, to know that you are going to fail at something, and the judgment needs to be 'that's OK, at least you tried'."

Innovation might seem like a doddle for her team, but she says it took a few years to get comfortable with questioning processes, ideas and theories about consumer products that had been in place for decades.

"I don't think you're born with it [innovative thinking] but if you're around the right people and ask the right questions you can learn it. But you need to be in an environment where it is OK to ask questions," she says.

She wants more people to talk about their ideas, and their failures. "What's the worst that happens? It's all lessons. It's just some lessons are more expensive than others."

Westpac head of digital business banking, Kalpana Gee, doesn't use the term "failure", because she knows how much it hampers new ideas.

"Fear of failure is almost like a mindset where you've made the stake so high you become paralysed with it. That stops innovation. You're too worried that what you're delivering is not going to work."

For many organisations, that fear is driven by the bottom line, where the concern about expensive mistakes can make the leadership reluctant to change. Ms Gee says the trick to convincing traditionalists is to capture their imagination.

She now prefers butcher's paper and sketches rather than business plans to pitch new ideas. "If you can get people to visualise it, all of a sudden they will believe what you believe, versus reading a business case; you're still just looking at the bottom line."

Ms Gee had the opportunity to test her methods for encouraging innovation, establishing an Innovation Challenge between Westpac and incubator BlueChilli, to find start-ups with fresh ways of servicing first the real estate sector, and for the most recent round, agribusiness. It's looking for ideas that could completely change the way Australian farmers and producers live and work.

Westpac also sent a team to work at BlueChilli for five weeks, tasked with finding disruptive opportunities in business banking.

"We acted in a venture capital role to test and push them. It's so different from the way a bank would do it. They did incredibly well. I don't think we would have thought about [their new ideas] had we not done this."

The Australian Financial Review/Westpac 100 Women of Influence Awards promote bold and diverse women championing change in business and society. Enter yourself or someone you know in one or more of the 10 categories: local/regional, board/management, innovation, culture, public policy, business enterprise, diversity, young leader, global, social enterprise/not-for-profit. Entries close August 9. For more information go to www.100womenofinfluence.com.au

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