The DNA of innovation is changing. From ownership to usage, from participation where I contribute an idea to collaboration where I share a decision, from selling to freemium.
Innovation can be commercial, economic, managerial, procedural or cultural, and everybody in an organisation can take part in it. That breadth is what makes the subject so easy to talk about and so hard to act on.
So when a leadership team says it wants a culture of innovation, the question is how to turn that into something tangible and usable without falling into the usual simplifications. Most advice in this area has no address on it: leadership buy-in, psychological safety, time to experiment, permission to fail, all offered identically to a family manufacturer in regional Victoria and a venture-backed software company in Sydney.
The innovation genome is the model I built to fix that. Four bases, spelling GTAC as the actual nucleotides do, describing what a specific business is made of and therefore what kind of innovation is available to it.
I have refined the model and the tools since first publishing it, and the four bases have not moved. What has become clearer is that the order matters more than the list, which is the part most people skip.
| The usual advice | Why it fails to land | The model that replaces it |
|---|---|---|
| Install a culture of innovationLeadership buy-in, psychological safety, time to experiment and permission to fail get recommended to every organisation in the same words, regardless of size, ownership, location or history. | Practices are not portableA practice that works in one business depends on conditions that business happens to have. Copied into an organisation built on different foundations, the same practice produces effort without result, and the failure gets blamed on execution. | Four bases, in your own orderThe innovation genome describes a business through geography and genealogy, technology and trends, assets and alignment, and culture and codes. Reading which base leads shows what kind of innovation that organisation can realistically pursue. |
What the innovation genome is, and what it is not
Innovation DNA is the everyday name for this idea. The model uses four bases to describe what a business is made of, borrowing the letters biology uses for the same job. It is a diagnostic rather than a maturity ladder, so no sequence is better than another and there is no score to improve.
The four bases of the innovation genome
Guanine, thymine, adenine and cytosine are the four nucleotide bases of actual DNA, and GTAC is what this model spells. Each letter names a pair of forces that together determine what a given organisation can invent.
- G for geography and genealogy. Where the business took root and what happened to it since.
- T for technology and trends. How readily it absorbs new tools and reads what is coming.
- A for assets and alignment. The financial position of the business, and whose interests its ownership structure actually serves.
- C for culture and codes. The rituals, traditions and unwritten rules that decide what is normal there.
The metaphor holds further than metaphors usually do. A genome is inherited rather than chosen, it constrains what an organism can become without dictating the outcome, and the same four letters produce radically different results depending on how they are arranged and which parts get expressed.
How this differs from the Innovator’s DNA
There is a well-known book with a similar title and a different subject, and the distinction matters. The Innovator’s DNA, by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen, is about individual people.
Their research identified five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting. Their claim is that these are learnable, so a person can become more innovative by practising them.
My four bases describe the organisation rather than the person. They are not skills anyone can practise, and they are not learnable, because you did not choose your founding location, your ownership structure or the codes that formed in your first decade.
The two work together rather than competing. Their five skills tell you how to develop the people. The four bases tell you which kind of innovation those people will be able to get through the organisation once they have the ideas.
Why the sequence matters more than the letters
Every organisation has all four bases, which makes the list itself close to useless. What differs is the order: which one dominates, which one comes second, and which one an organisation would rather not talk about.
A business whose first letter is A behaves differently from one whose first letter is C, even in the same industry on the same street. The first will assess an innovation against what its owners need, and the second against whether it feels like something they do.
This is where copied practices come apart. A ritual that works in a founder-controlled software company depends on that company’s sequence, and dropping it into a member-owned organisation with a different order produces the ritual without the result.
G is for geography and genealogy
Where a business takes root and what has happened to it since exert a strong pull on its culture and its innovations. This is the base leaders most often dismiss as background colour, and in Australia it is frequently the one doing the most work.
Where a business takes root shapes what it can invent
Geography supplies raw materials, constraints, customers and a labour market, and each of those shapes what an organisation is capable of imagining. A business built around a local resource inherits an innovation path that would have been unavailable three hundred kilometres inland.
Australia adds two forces most markets do not have. Distance from major markets makes exporting a design constraint rather than a growth phase, and a small domestic population means many businesses have to be globally viable from early on or not at all.
Isolation cuts the other way too. It removes the option of importing a solution, which forces organisations to build capability they would otherwise have bought, and that capability becomes the thing they are known for decades later.
The genealogy underneath
Genealogy is the history and evolution of the business, and it adds a layer of complexity to the geography. Every stage of development and every past decision forms the base on which the organisation builds whatever comes next.
CSL is the clearest Australian illustration I know. The Commonwealth Serum Laboratories were founded in 1916 to supply life-saving products to a country isolated by war, at a point when Australia relied entirely on medicines shipped from the other side of the world.
Read the two forces separately and the point becomes obvious. Geography created the problem, since isolation cut the supply line. Genealogy created the answer, since a government laboratory set up to solve that problem became an organisation that develops biological products, including antivenoms for snakes that live nowhere else.
Neither force has been chosen by anyone currently working there, and both still shape what the business finds natural. That is what inheritance means in this model, and why a G-dominant organisation should stop apologising for it and start using it.
T is for technology and trends
This base measures how readily a business absorbs new technology and how well it reads what is coming. I call it trendability, and it varies enormously between organisations that look similar from outside.
Trendability, and how to read your own
Trendability is the capacity to integrate innovation easily and to move with or ahead of current movements rather than behind them. It is a property of the organisation rather than of its technology budget, which is why well-funded businesses frequently score badly on it.
Three questions read it quickly. How long does it take a new tool to go from someone noticing it to someone using it in real work? How many approvals sit in between? And when was the last time the organisation adopted something before its competitors did?
The answers usually surprise executives, because the perceived pace and the actual pace differ by a wide margin. Trendability is measurable in weeks rather than opinions, and the trendability tool exists to make that reading systematic.
What high trendability looks like
A T-dominant organisation does more than embrace technology. It anticipates where behaviour is heading and builds for that, which means it will sometimes look ridiculous for a year or two before looking early. Read its innovation DNA and the whole business is arranged around being early.
The weakness of a T-dominant genome is worth naming alongside the strength. These organisations chase, and chasing has a cost, which is why deciding what to ignore matters as much as deciding what to adopt. I have set out how I approach that in the framework on sources of disruption.
A is for assets and alignment
The financial position of a business and the interests its ownership aligns it to play a determining role in strategy and direction, and this is the base leaders are least willing to discuss openly. It is also the one that explains most of the difference between two otherwise identical businesses.
Three alignments, three innovation behaviours
At one end sit businesses owned by the people who work in them or by their members, where the emphasis falls on the wellbeing of those people and the long-term durability of the organisation. Australia has a substantial member-owned sector in health insurance, banking and motoring services.
At the other end sit businesses held by a founding family and its descendants, where long-term vision and family continuity shape decisions in ways a quarterly cycle never could. Australia’s private company landscape is full of these, and their planning horizons are measured in generations.
Between those two sit organisations oriented towards returning value to shareholders in the short term, where decisions are frequently driven by immediate financial gain rather than by a durable view.
What each structure makes easy and hard
Member-owned and employee-owned organisations find patient innovation easy and fast pivots hard, because the same governance that protects the long view slows every decision that needs one person to carry it.
Family-controlled businesses can commit to something for a decade without justifying it to anyone, which is a real advantage, and they carry a matching risk. Innovation that implies the founder’s original judgement was wrong becomes personally difficult rather than commercially difficult.
Listed businesses under reporting pressure innovate readily where the return is visible inside the cycle and poorly where it is not. This is a structural feature rather than a failure of will, and treating it as a leadership problem wastes everybody’s time.
The practical use of this base is honesty about what your structure forbids. An A-dominant organisation should stop buying innovation programs designed for a different ownership model and start choosing the innovation its own structure can actually carry.
C is for culture and codes
The culture of a business is sometimes so powerful it borders on a cult. Rituals, traditions and unwritten codes shape the working environment and the identity of the organisation, creating belonging and cohesion while reinforcing the values underneath.
Rituals do the work that values statements claim to
A values statement describes what an organisation would like to be true. A ritual is what people actually do on a specific date, which is why rituals are the readable part of a culture and posters are not.
Atlassian’s ShipIt is the Australian example worth studying. By the company’s own account, it began in 2005 as a 24-hour hackathon among fourteen developers in a cramped Sydney office and grew into a quarterly global event with thousands of participants across more than twenty cities.
The mechanics are what make it a code rather than an event. Work stops, teams form across departments that never normally collaborate, and every team presents for three minutes at the end, which means the ritual has a deadline, an audience and a public verdict.
Notice that it survived the company’s growth from a Sydney room to a listed multinational. A ritual that survives scaling is load-bearing, and one that gets dropped during a busy year was decoration.
When culture tips into cult
Strong codes create belonging, and the same force that produces cohesion also produces conformity. An organisation where everyone knows the unwritten rules is an organisation where breaking one is expensive, which is a problem for a business that says it wants new thinking.
The tell is what happens to a newcomer who does something the wrong way. Where the correction is friendly and explicit, the code is healthy. Where it is silent and social, the culture has started doing the job of a rulebook without any of a rulebook’s accountability.
C-dominant organisations therefore innovate beautifully within their own frame and struggle to leave it. Their advantage is speed and cohesion, and their exposure is that a change of direction reads as a betrayal rather than a decision.
Field note
Sequencing my own company
Reboot Inc., one of my own businesses, sequences as TACG. Technology and trends first, assets and alignment second, culture and codes third, geography and genealogy last.
Running the model on my own company was the test of whether it was honest, and the useful part was not the result. It was noticing which letter I wanted to put first before I did the work. Most people building a business would like to lead with culture, because culture is the flattering answer and the one that sounds like a choice. The sequence that came out put it third, behind two forces I had not selected and could not change by wanting to.
The lesson I now carry into every sequencing session is to run the exercise twice: once asking the team what order they believe they are in, and once against the evidence. The distance between those two sequences is the finding. A team that guesses its own genome correctly is already working with it, and a team that guesses wrongly has been buying practices designed for a business it is not.
Sequencing your own innovation genome
Once you can see what links the four letters in your business, the question becomes which comes first, which second and so on. The sequencing takes a morning, needs no external data, and changes what an organisation should buy more reliably than any maturity assessment I have used.
How to run the sequencing
Five steps, run with a leadership team in one room, produce a four-letter sequence and an argument worth having. The argument is usually more valuable than the sequence.
- Ask everyone to write down the order they believe the business is in, privately, before any discussion.
- List the last ten significant decisions the organisation made, with no filtering for how flattering they are.
- For each decision, identify which base actually determined it. Not which base was cited, which one decided.
- Count. The base that decided most often is your first letter, and continue down from there.
- Compare that sequence with the private guesses from step one, and discuss the gap rather than the result.
Step three is where people resist, because the base that was cited in the board paper and the base that actually decided are often different letters. That gap is not dishonesty, it is the ordinary distance between the reason given and the reason held.
What each leading base tends to need
The sequence is a diagnosis rather than a verdict, and the point of having it is knowing which kind of help will work. Buying the wrong kind is the most common waste in this field.
| Leading base | What this organisation does well | Where it gets stuck | What actually helps |
|---|---|---|---|
| G, geography and genealogy | Deep capability built from constraint, hard for others to copy | Assumes its own history is a limit rather than an asset | Reconnecting the founding problem to a present market |
| T, technology and trends | Fast adoption and early positioning on new movements | Chases everything and finishes little | A discard discipline and a documented list of what to ignore |
| A, assets and alignment | Clear-eyed about what innovation has to return and when | Rejects anything whose payoff falls outside the ownership horizon | Matching the innovation type to the structure instead of fighting it |
| C, culture and codes | Fast, cohesive execution once the group agrees | Cannot leave its own frame without it feeling like betrayal | Outside voices with explicit permission to break the code |
Read across your own row and the practices worth buying become obvious, as do the ones to stop buying. A C-dominant business does not need another values workshop, and a T-dominant one does not need more inspiration.
Want to read your T before you read the rest?
Curious how quickly your organisation actually absorbs anything new? Measure it with the trendability tool, then bring the number to your sequencing session instead of an opinion.
How I can help you sequence and use it
The model is only worth having if it changes what an organisation buys and stops buying. Most of my work here is running the sequencing honestly, then translating the result into a short list of practices that suit the business in the room rather than the one in the case study.
Workshops and diagnostics
The sequencing workshop runs the five steps with a leadership team and spends most of its time on the gap between the guessed order and the evidenced one. That gap is where the decisions live.
The trendability diagnostic goes deeper on the T base, since it is the one that can be measured rather than argued about, and it gives the rest of the discussion an anchor in something factual.
Keynotes and managerial innovation programs
Keynotes suit the moment when an organisation has copied someone else’s practices and cannot work out why nothing took. Naming the genome explains the failure without blaming anybody, which is usually what the room needs first.
Longer programs build on that, and there is more on the wider practice in my work on managerial innovation. Where the sequencing reveals a business that no longer recognises itself, the work moves closer to reinvention rather than transformation.
If you want to know your own sequence, a conversation is faster than a proposal. You can tell me which letter you think comes first and we can test it against your last few decisions.
Conclusion: what is your sequence?
Innovation culture becomes usable the moment you stop treating it as a single thing to install and start treating it as something a specific business is already made of. Four bases, in an order you did not choose, describing what is genuinely available to you.
The genome constrains without determining. Two organisations with the same four letters produce different results depending on which one they lead with and how deliberately they use it, which is where the leadership work actually sits.
What it removes is the excuse and the shopping list at the same time. You cannot copy your way to an innovation culture, and you also cannot claim your structure forbids one, because the constraint sets the range rather than the outcome.
So work out your own innovation genome, starting with the letter that actually decided your last ten decisions. Mine reads TACG. What does yours read?
Frequently asked questions about the innovation genome
What are the four bases of the innovation genome?
Geography and genealogy, technology and trends, assets and alignment, and culture and codes, spelling GTAC as the actual nucleotides do. Together they describe what a specific business is made of and therefore what kind of innovation is realistically available to it.
Is this the same as the Innovator’s DNA?
No. The Innovator’s DNA by Dyer, Gregersen and Christensen identifies five learnable discovery skills of individual innovators. The innovation genome describes the organisation rather than the person, using four inherited bases that shape what ideas can get through once people have them.
Why does the order of the letters matter?
Every organisation has all four bases, so the list alone says nothing. The order shows which force actually decides, which explains why a practice that works in one business produces effort without result in another with the same letters in a different sequence.
What is trendability?
Trendability is my term for how readily an organisation absorbs new technology and moves with or ahead of current trends. It is a property of the organisation rather than of its technology budget, and it is measurable in weeks: how long a new tool takes to reach real work, and how many approvals sit in the way.
Can you change your innovation genome?
Not the bases themselves, since nobody chose their founding location, ownership structure or early codes. What changes is which parts get expressed and which base an organisation leads with deliberately, so the genome sets the range while leadership decides the outcome within it.
