Brennan launches managed innovation platform

Systems integrator Brennan has launched a managed innovation capability designed to help Australian organisations transform business problems and ideas into practical outcomes.

The Brennan Innovation Foundry has been designed to act as an efficient way to identify, test, deploy and scale innovations. The solution combines idea capture and assessment to help organisations prioritise opportunities using criteria including strategic value, expected return and effort.

Brennan founder and managing director Dave Stevens said AI alone is unlikely to be able to deliver the productivity improvements Australian organisations and the wider economy need.

“There is no shortage of innovative ideas coming from staff and customers, but what businesses lack is a visible and governed way to determine which of them will support the business strategy, deliver value and are worthy of investment,” he said. “Businesses have established systems to manage finance, people and customer service, but innovation is often treated in an ad-hoc way, relying on unstructured emails, spreadsheets, disconnected teams and one-off pilot programs.”

Stevens said the Brennan Innovation Foundry supports rapid prototyping, while leadership retains visibility and control across the innovation pipeline. The platform has tools for reporting for governance and observability.

“The Brennan Innovation Foundry gives an organisation a cohesive governed way to manage innovation across the whole business faster and more cost-effectively than ever possible before,” he said. “It captures ideas wherever they arise, allows leadership to assess them against strategic priorities and measurable outcomes, and helps turn the strongest into working solutions. The objective is not to pursue every idea. It is to test ideas earlier, stop those that do not demonstrate sufficient value and invest with greater confidence in those that do.”

The platform has already been rolled out internally and helped the company generate more innovation in the past six months than the previous three years, the company said. Since April, the Foundry has received and assessed more than 230 ideas, of which 30 have been developed into delivered outcomes.

Examples include the Brennan Skills Marketplace, which includes more than 30 AI skills, workflows and automation patterns that can be reused to accelerate innovation and increase returns on investment while reducing duplicated and wasted development work.

“We now have access to dozens of business systems and features that we didn’t previously, and they’re all completely customised to our needs and growing by the day,” Stevens said. “One example of how this approach enhanced productivity in our business is the automation of the vulnerability-assessment process, which is saving up to five hours of manual engineering work per incident and enabling teams to respond to security issues faster.”

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