MAKING INNOVATION REAL™
Systematic innovation management. Made practical.
Making Innovation REAL™ is Kent Matla’s umbrella brand for books, research, models, frameworks, and capability-building resources designed to strengthen innovation as a systematic and professional management discipline.
It connects research-grounded thinking with practical methods that help organisations understand capability, identify gaps, manage accumulated innovation debt, and build the capacity to realise future value through innovation.
LATEST RELEASE
The Cost of Not Innovating
Understanding and Managing Organisational Innovation Debt
Organisations can appear operationally successful while steadily eroding their capacity to innovate.
White Paper 1 introduces Organisational Innovation Debt as a proposed, research-grounded management construct and provides practical frameworks for recognising, assessing, and repaying the accumulated liability.
By Kent Matla | Version 1.0 | 64 pages | August 2026
ORGANISATIONAL DIAGNOSTIC
See the system behind the activity
The Making Innovation REAL™ Organisational Diagnostic assesses how systematically an organisation manages innovation across nine interconnected dimensions.
Using 40 anchored questions and participant evidence, it helps leaders distinguish visible innovation activity from underlying capability, identify gaps and accumulated innovation debt, and focus improvement where it matters most.
Nine dimensions | Snapshot and Full Report | Evidence-informed priorities
ABOUT KENT MATLA
Research-grounded. Practice-tested.
Kent Matla is an innovation-management leader, strategic adviser, author, and researcher with more than 30 years of executive, consulting, investment, and cross-border experience across Australia and Asia.
His work focuses on helping organisations make innovation a disciplined, governable, and repeatable management practice—connecting strategy, systems, capability, evidence, and implementation.
He is Chairperson of the Australian Innovation Management Institute (AIMI), a GIMI-certified innovation-management expert and ISO 56001 auditor, and the author of Making Innovation Real: A Practical Guide to Innovation Management.
Areas of focus
Innovation strategy and governance
Organisational capability and operating models
Innovation diagnostics and evidence-informed action
Portfolio management and value realisation
Innovation ecosystems and collaboration
Capability building for boards, executives, and practitioners