i had a similar situation with my supervisor at my last job. she was completely threatened by me and every time i offered her a suggestion that would improve a process she would interpret my efforts as some sort of manipulation to make her look bad. i can't tell you how many times i asked her why we did something a particular way, only to have her answer "that's the way we've always done it." it drove me nuts! she was basically incompetent and no one in my department had any respect for her. what we wound up doing was banding together and working around her. i would come up with an idea and get everyone else on board. then we'd all work the kinks out together and one of us (never me) would finesse her with it and make her think she came up with the idea on her own and we were just wowed by her managerial prowess. by the time she left the company (she died at 76) we had this down to a science.

like you, we all knew going to hr was going to be a waste of time due to her age and the fact that she had been with the company almost 20 years.

if you have a pretty good working relationship with your other coworkers and can get past the fact that you'll never receive official credit for any of your ideas, you might want to try working with your coworkers on this. some of them might also have ideas they haven't bothered to mention to your lead.

the beauty of this method is it's hard for your lead to protest. if he tries confronting you, you can always argue that you know he's got a million things going on and you didn't want to waste his time with an idea until you could present a completely workable solution to him. since you're not actually implementing anything without his involvement, he can't really complain to hr without looking like a petty jerk.

as usual, just my $0.02...