42. Inventium

Founder: Amantha Imber

Revenue: $404,000

Started: 2007

Head Office: Victoria

Employees: 1.5

Industry: Consulting & Corporate Strategy

Website: https://www.inventium.com.au

Most consultants are great at offering advice, but some can struggle with providing evidence to support their recommendations.

Amantha Imber noticed this and started Inventium, a consultancy that uses science to help companies improve creative thinking and innovation.

“Inventium is a consultancy that builds capability around creative thinking, idea generation and innovation, and we also facilitate innovation projects for our clients to help them generate better ideas to bring to market.”

At the heart of the company’s offering is a psychometric testing tool “that can predict and measure creative performance as work”.

Imber says this tool provided the company with enough legitimacy to work with some major clients. But Imber also faced a serious personal crisis during the start-up phase – his father had a major stroke and was admitted to hospital for a month.

“This made me realise how reliant the business was on me and from that point on, I made some structural and staff changes to ease the business’s reliance on me.”

The company has already worked with Medibank Private and Deloitte and has received significant interest from Kimberly-Clark.

Imber also faced another problem during the start-up phase when innovation consultancy What If collapsed two years ago, leading to the establishment of several smaller firms competing for work.

However, Imber says Inventium has been able to maintain its growth “due to having a strong and differentiated positioning in the market” with its unique psychometric test.