Customer Team Innovation Centre
A cross-functional innovation forum at Brennan that I co-lead alongside a broader core team. Standing seats across Marketing, Solution Architecture, Bid Management and Sales Operations, with other voices from the business pulled in when the work calls for it. Regular cadence, focused work, and a deliberate resistance to becoming a powerpoint factory. Most of the work projects on this site started here.
The problem this is for
Innovation in a managed services business tends to happen by accident. Someone gets curious. Someone has a quiet week. Someone shows up at a Friday demo with a thing they built on the weekend. The result is real, but it's not repeatable. The same five people are responsible for almost everything new. The other three hundred wait for their work to be assigned.
CTIC is the deliberate operating rhythm that makes that less of an accident. The premise is straightforward. If you put the right people in the same room on a regular cadence, with permission to push past the immediate quarter, the work produces itself. The role of the forum is not to do the work. It is to put the people in the room and clear the path for them to do it.
How it operates
The cadence is regular, not relentless. Frequent enough that work has somewhere to go between meetings. Spaced enough that real progress can happen between them.
The standing seats are cross-functional by design. Marketing brings the customer language. Solution Architecture brings the technical reach. Bid Management brings the commercial pattern recognition. Sales Operations brings the data and the operating constraints. None of those perspectives produces the answer alone. All of them together produce the framing that makes the answer obvious.
The guest seats matter as much as the standing ones. Other people from across the business are pulled in when a piece of work needs fresh eyes: to hone an idea, challenge an assumption, or bring the culture of inspection to something that has been moving too smoothly. The standing team is the spine. The guests are the muscle and the conscience.
The selection criterion across both is the same. Whoever shows up with ideas, never whoever shows up with authority. Often not the most senior person in the function. Often the person two layers down who actually carries the curiosity.
What gets in the way
Three failure modes that other innovation programmes fall into. CTIC has actively resisted each one.
The powerpoint factory. The point of the forum is to ship things. The discipline is to put real artefacts on the table at every session. Working prototypes, draft documents, half-built skills. Decks about the artefacts are a substitute for the artefacts themselves and the forum treats them that way.
The committee. Innovation forums that become governance bodies stop producing innovation. CTIC's role is to clear the path for the work, never to approve it. Once a thing is real enough to ship, it leaves the forum.
The same five people. The trap is for the forum to become the only place where new work happens. The intent is the opposite. CTIC is meant to be where patterns are seeded, then transferred out to the rest of the business. A thing that started in CTIC and ended in CTIC is a failure of the forum.
What it's produced
Several of the work projects on this site trace back to CTIC discussions in one form or another. Brennan Deal Coach started as a CTIC conversation about what a discovery transcript could become if it stopped being a chat log. The Brennan Brand skill came out of a CTIC observation that AI assistants were spreading faster than central guidance could land. The Sales Manager Assistant and FY27 strategy work matured through CTIC over multiple sessions before any of it became a real artefact.
That is the visible output. The less visible output is the patterns the forum has surfaced. Adoption-first design. Skill, agent and project as building blocks. The role of platform constraints in shaping what gets shipped. None of those patterns were invented in a session. They emerged from watching what worked and what did not across the projects that ran through the room.
The lesson
Innovation is not a budget line. It is an operating rhythm. The most expensive thing a company can do is decide to innovate, allocate a budget to it, and never have a place for the work to actually happen. CTIC is the cheaper, more boring alternative. Put the right people in the room. Give the work somewhere to go between meetings. Resist the gravity towards powerpoint and approval. The output compounds.
The harder lesson is about the role of the forum itself. CTIC works because the team does not try to do the innovation in the room. The room is a place where innovation has somewhere to land, where ideas get inspected, and where the path to ship gets cleared. That is a different job to doing the work itself. It is the one that scales.