The Gatherer Vol 11

Eva Chye is the director of PwC Business Align and Connect, and is also the co-founder of If Innovation Could Talk. Eva has an immense passion for the innovation landscape, and most importantly, the great innovative minds that cross it. Eva recently joined Wrays’ CEO Rob Pierce to explore what innovation looks like to her and the remarkable people she meets each day. Rob: Through your work, you continue to have an immense opportunity to col laborate and interact with many diverse and inspiring innovators. What does innovation mean to you? Eva: Well, for me, it’s about making things better and making improvements all the time. So, can you think back to a time you suggested an idea to someone and they said to you, “Oh, but we’ve always done it this way,” or, “We can’t do it that way”? My motto has always been to be better today than I was yesterday. I realised innovation is not actually success overnight. It takes a lot of hard work and you have to constantly build on improving yourself and therefore building a better team and working environment around you. I have worked both overseas and in Australia over the last 25 years. I’ve worked through the whole spectrum from witnessing basic R&D in action, to witnessing commercialisation in action, in my current role at PwC. What I see is how hard people work at improving things every single day. The open-mindedness to new ideas and the courage to pursue those ideas, to me, is innovation. Rob: Is there one lesson that has resonated that you’ve learned from an innovator? Eva: Definitely their persistence. This sounds controversial, but innovation can actually be boring and it can be lonely when you’re trying to pursue new ideas. I love the African saying ‘if you want to go fast, you go alone.

And if you want to go far, you go together.’ That really resonates with me because sometimes in order to start a new idea, to chart a new path, you might have to do it alone just to get the idea off the ground, but once it has legs, people will want to come along and that’s when you can grow faster and go further by working as a team. So, the persistence, the courage to start, and the diversity and inclusion of bringing people on board is very important in innovation, in my opinion. Something I heard recently is the phrase ‘failure is fashionable’. I’ve never thought of it that way, but it’s so true. We should encourage that culture. Rob: Absolutely. We’ve all failed at various projects or points in our lives, and going back to your point, it’s that persistence. It’s that, keeping going, that ultimately gets your goal achieved. What do you think is going to be the greatest innovation and learning that we carry forward into 2021 and beyond? Eva: What we saw in 2020 is that where there is a will, there is a way. With uncharted territory in front of us, we need a challenge-accept mindset. So, when we meet challenges, we are ready to accept the challenges. Just as innovation is not overnight success, whatever you did yesterday, the month before, currently do, builds to help you improve and come up with new ways to find the answer in uncharted territory. In my job at PwC Align, because I work with companies that are tech scaleups, who have a much shorter runway than the large corporate and government clients. So, when COVID hit, it hit them really, really hard. But what was inspiring to see was how quickly and agile they were able to pivot their product. Traditionally, the products had commercial impact, but they were able to pivot it quickly in response to COVID, and create a product with social impact. Many were able to do this almost overnight because of all the hard work that had gone into it pre-COVID. It wasn’t like something just invented on the spot. What they had done was use technology, research and R&D they had built up over the years, and very quickly change it to respond to COVID. For example, this could have been a wellbeing programme that was traditionally used for corporate culture, which became a wellbeing programme that’s used for individual psychology and wellbeing and mental health. There are plenty more examples like that.

Eva Chye Director, PwC, Business Align and Connect & co-founder of If Innovation Could Talk

PIONEER - extract of interview with Eva Chye

26 | The Gatherer

wrays . com.au | 27