The Challenge
As a water utility, Wannon Water faces an array of challenges – from aging infrastructure, tightening regulation, climate uncertainty, and increasing pressure to provide cost-efficient services to customers in light of rising costs. Innovation has been recognised as an essential organisational and individual capability in tackling and adapting to future challenges.
In pursuing this innovation agenda, Wannon Water engaged ThinkPlaceX to conduct an Innovation and Design Needs Assessment. This sought to better understand what innovation ‘looks like’ and how it is defined in day-to-day work at Wannon Water, what key barriers and enablers exist in the current state of innovation, what the opportunities and focus areas are for maximising innovation, collaboration, creativity and customer-centricity, and providing a series of recommendations around key focus areas for unlocking innovation and instilling human-centred design into Wannon Water’s business-as-usual.
Our Response
ThinkPlaceX used a design thinking process to explore the current state of innovation at Wannon Water, gather evidence, and formulate recommendations. The discovery process involved pre-intent interview with members of the executive team and the Senior Management Team, focus groups with team leaders and coordinators, a survey that engaged respondents across the organisation, and a week-long remote ethnographic research activity with operations and maintenance staff using text messaging. These different techniques and the wide scope of engagement provided an ideal cross-sectioning of the organisation, and allowed us to understand the state of innovation from different viewpoints.
To support Wannon Water in lifting its innovation culture, we began by analysing data from engagements and activities, which were synthesised into five key insights about the current state of innovation across the organisation. Building on these insights, we applied chaos and complexity theory alongside organisational design frameworks to deepen our understanding of the system dynamics shaping innovation behaviour. This helped us identify key levers for change—the structural and cultural conditions that, if shifted, could unlock greater innovation capability. Ideas to activate these levers were generated collaboratively through stakeholder engagements, co-design sessions, and thematic analysis. These ideas informed a set of targeted strategies and recommendations aimed at embedding innovation as a driver of collaboration, employee creativity, and customer value. Together, these elements form a strategic roadmap to build an agile, adaptive, and innovation-ready workforce—positioning Wannon Water to meet future challenges with creativity, responsiveness, and impact.
The Impact
This innovation and design needs assessment gave Wannon Water a critical opportunity to explore the current state of innovation across the organisation—surfacing both enablers and barriers within its culture. It created space for senior leaders to reflect on innovation as a strategic capability, recognise existing efforts, and identify where greater focus is needed. The final report provides a strong foundation for embedding innovation into business-as-usual. This project also demonstrated ThinkPlaceX’s agile and responsive approach—shifting from a capability program to a deeper diagnostic in close partnership with the executive team to ensure lasting, strategic value.
Case studies
View all case studies
Reducing Violence Against Women Family Safety Innovation Hub
Read case study
Driving Sector-Wide Innovation to Create Sustainable Futures
Read case study