Activate Innovation Lounge

If you had an idea in your organization, would you know where to go?

That question is the simplest audit of whether you have an innovating engine or just innovation theater.

Ben Bensaou asks it every time he walks into a company. He interviews 15 to 20 people randomly. Frontline employees. Middle managers. Specialists.

Most say no.

Or they say: Go talk to R&D. Go talk to the innovation unit. It is not my job.

But the companies Ben studied for 15 years? The ones that became innovation powerhouses without disruption?

They all say yes.

They know exactly where to go. Who the innovation coordinator is at their level. Where the training unit is if they want to develop a new skill. How to find an internal coach to support their team.

Ben is a professor at INSEAD and author of Built to Innovate. He spent years studying 400-year-old companies like Fiskars entering new markets. Traditional manufacturers like Kordsa reframing themselves as the reinforcer and entering aerospace. Pharmaceutical giants like Bayer building platforms where 40,000 employees participate.

None of them relied on genius leaders. None of them chased disruptive breakthroughs.

They built innovating engines. Concrete structures where anyone can innovate as part of their job.

In this episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge, Ben unpacks the three pillars: permission, capability, and motivation. He explains why frontline employees are best positioned to sense customer pain points. Why middle managers are the critical link between permission and execution. And how companies like Bayer trained 1,000 internal coaches who bootstrap capability across the organization.

This is not theory. This is governance. Processes. Tools. Systems that treat innovating as a repeatable verb, not a lucky noun.

The Activate Innovation Lounge brings you conversations with leaders who build engines, not theater.

Listen now on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube. Link in comments.

There are a lot of  “why questions” that need to be answered when it comes to purposeful activation of employee innovators. And one of those is why do organizations and their leaders miss on cultivating this capability. The answer is not that leaders do not care. 

So Iliriana Kacaniku sat with Roel de Vries in this episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge to unpack this very question. Roel is the founder of Riverstone Blue and innovation strategist for a Dutch government department. He has spent sixteen years inside this exact problem. He has run platforms across 45,000 employees in five countries. He has watched a single idea from one of the smallest operations in Ireland return 104 million euros in realized savings. Not forecasted. Realized.

He walks Iliriana through what he learned the hard way. Why asking for ideas is the wrong question. Why he refused to call it a cost savings campaign and called it something else instead. Why he ran funeral pitches for the ideas that died. And what changed in the entire program when he started handing innovators a physical license to operate outside the lines.

By the end of the hour, you will have four concrete answers to the question in the title, and a clear sense of what to change first inside your own organization.

For the innovation lead who has built the platform and watched it stall. For the strategist handed a mandate without a strategy. For the leader who suspects the people with the answers are already on the payroll.

Here are some videos about the stories that Roel mentioned during the episode:

• The ideation campaign that resulted in over €100M realized savings (without literally asking for savings)
• The MatchBox Intrapreneurship training session
• The SparkPit (MatchBox Pitch) session
• The Liberty Global YouTube channel with further MatchBox and SparkPit recordings

And should you prefer to add one more newsletter to your list, Letter of Marque is a must.

The most powerful source of innovation in an organization is not the strategy, the technology, or the dedicated innovation team. It is the hidden innovator inside every employee. The agent in the contact center watching the same friction repeat. The cashier at the branch trying to ease the crowd. The new hire who spots a broken onboarding process before anyone else does.

In this episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge, Iliriana Kaçaniku sits down with Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager of the ID8 program and colleague innovation at TD Bank, to understand what it really takes to awaken that hidden innovator. Vlora has led an enterprise program across a workforce of over 100,000 people, collected more than 100,000 ideas, and watched over 10,000 of them come to life. Last December, TD lit Toronto's Union Station with 10,000 individual lights, one for every employee idea brought to life, each one activated by human movement.

Vlora shares how ID8 began as informal idea-sharing, evolved into challenge-based innovation, and why the promise of implementation is the engine that keeps it all running. If you lead innovation, with or without the title, this conversation is a blueprint.

What You Will Learn

• How ID8 started organically from employees fixing things "side of the desk," and what made leadership formalize it
• Why the people closest to the friction are the best source of problems worth solving
• The shift from an open idea box to challenge-based innovation, and what triggered it after the pandemic
• Why the promise of implementation has to be real, or participation dies
• The difference between "small i" incremental ideas and "big I" ideas, and why their paths diverge
• Why the internal crowd often beats an external one, thanks to tacit knowledge
• Why the best solution to a problem frequently comes from outside the team that owns it
• The critical role of leadership, and why it must cascade through every layer
• How AI can assist the innovation process without replacing human creativity

In this bonus episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge, Iliriana Kaçaniku continues her conversation with Jan Fischer of Innosabi, an innovation management platform that has helped enterprises run challenges, source ideas from employees and customers, and build communities of practice around innovation. What started as a quick exchange after their original recording turned into a second session worth publishing on its own.

Jan and Iliriana go deep on three threads. How to gamify innovation in ways that recognize not just the people who generate ideas, but the people who shape them and the quieter contributors who rate them. How customer co-creation, done early enough, can turn strangers into co-designers of a product.

If you lead innovation inside an organization, or carry the work without the title, this conversation will give you specific, operational language for activating the innovators you already have.

If you’re a leader who got excited and enthused to invite everyone in the organization to share ideas about innovation, please hold on, and don't do it. 

It may feel like the right thing to do, it may give you the excitement that you haven't felt for a while. It may make you feel energized because you are finally permitted to tap into the brilliance and wisdom that is already inside the organization.

You may wonder why stop when I just got the permission and the mandate?

Because if you collect ideas that don't solve anything, instead of inspiring those internal innovators that you aim to activate, you will disappoint them, erode the trust, damage your own leadership.   

Just  calling for ideas is the wrong place to start. 

My guest today has spent her entire career inside corporate innovation. From very first idea management platforms to more elaborate intrapreneurship programs, which she’s built herself from the ground up. She has designed what she calls a marketplace of problems. And she has seen, firsthand, the difference between organizations that perform innovation and organizations that actually do it.

She is Marta Jakab, a software engineer by training and an innovation leader by calling who has helped corporations master implementation of innovation and intrapreneurship programs. 

Marta says she speaks 8 languages. I say she speaks 10, including innovation and intrapreneurship. 

But I think her favorite language could be the 11th one. The one of problem solving.

I am your host Iliriana Kacaniku, an innovation strategist at heart, and this is the Activate Innovation Lounge, a podcast dedicated to all leaders with or without innovation in their title who want to activate innovators, innovation, and innovation culture in their organization.

Let’s welcome Marta Jakab to the conversation. 

In the first part of this conversation, Alexis Samuel laid out what he calls the Baker's Dozen. Twelve building blocks for activating grassroots innovation in a large enterprise.

From the CEO's call to innovate to psychological safety.

From branding a program to measuring how it generates its return on investment.

It was a masterclass in the architecture of innovation at scale. Especially for corporations.

But who are the people, that is the employees, that respond to such calls? Why do they respond? Do they all engage with such initiatives?

That is the human story inside the architecture. And that is what this second episode is about.

Today, we move from strategy to people. From building the system to understanding what it feels like to be inside it.

We talk about who the grassroots innovators really are, what activates their curiosity and drive to engage with innovation calls, and what makes them stop participating. 

I personally learned something new about this last one.

Alexis Samuel spent 35 years in the corporate world ensuring excellent delivery of IT services. He never held innovation in his title. Yet he activated innovators throughout his career, and in his last chapter he shaped a program to activate grassroots innovators across a global company with over 250,000 employees.

He is not your common go-to person when it comes to innovation. Yet his wisdom is priceless.

I am your host Iliriana Kacaniku, an innovation strategist at heart, and this is the Activate Innovation Lounge, a podcast dedicated to all leaders with or without innovation in their title who want to activate innovators, innovation, and innovation culture in their organization.

Chapters

00:00 Understanding Grassroots Innovators

07:12 Motivation and Engagement in Innovation

12:36 Hackathons vs. Extended Innovation Challenges

19:41 Setting the Stage for Successful Innovation

25:35 The Role of AI in Innovation Processes

36:19 Leveraging External Ecosystems for Innovation

41:07 The Future of Innovation Programs

46:43 Sustaining Innovation Through Leadership Changes

53:10 Activating Grassroots Innovators

55:18 The Future of Innovation Programs

There is a tension in how organizations think about activating employee innovators.

Who knows best what needs to be solved?

The leader who sees the business from the top? Or the employee who lives the friction every day?

Alexis Samuel spent over 35 years ensuring excellent delivery of global IT services for large technology enterprises. He activated thousands of grassroots innovators without ever holding innovation in his title.

His answer is clear: go to the people doing the work.

Ask them what can be done better, what needs to drop, what can be automated, what can be eliminated. Simplify, combine, automate, eliminate. That backlog becomes your innovation agenda. And today, it also becomes your AI roadmap.

The employees closest to the friction are the ones who know where it lives.

Now a question for you as a leader:

Have you ever watched your team solve the wrong problem brilliantly — because no one asked them which problem actually needed solving first?

What does it take in your organization to surface the right problems before jumping to solutions?

Drop your answer in the comments.

In the next episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge, Alexis unpacks this and several other sharp ideas on activating grassroots innovators at scale — including how AI fits into every stage of the process.

Part two goes live this Friday. Tune in wherever you get your podcasts.

Why do most innovation programs generate excitement but deliver nothing? You collect hundreds of ideas. Award the best ones. Then watch them die in handoff limbo.

Alexis Samuel has spent decades building grassroots innovation programs at scale in global services firms.

He reveals who actually shows up to innovate, how to set transparent evaluation criteria, and how to build scaffolding that carries ideas from submission to implementation.

You will learn why doers—not managers—drive the best innovations, how to use AI for screening without eliminating human judgment, and why innovation programs need to rebrand every three years.

This episode is for leaders tired of innovation theater and ready to build systems where ideas actually ship.

Key takeaways:

• Broadening the definition of innovation draws everyone in.
• CEO sponsorship and clear vision are critical for grassroots programs.
• Ring-fencing problems and setting measurable goals drive success.
• Training and continuous refreshment of skills are essential.
• Transparent metrics and psychological safety foster innovation.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction to Innovation Leadership

03:21 The Role of Grassroots Innovation

05:21 Defining Problems for Innovation

09:14 Activating Grassroots Innovators

14:13 Who should find the problem to solve?

18:21 The Baker's Dozen framework 

32:01 How to motivate managers and create psychological safety for engagement in innovation?

37:02 How to manage reward and recognition for grassroots innovators?

42:05 How to measure the Return on Investment of grassroots innovation campaigns?

55:54 Success stories from grassroots innovation

01:04 Key Takeaway

Innovation is inherently uncertain because it is about the future. That uncertainty is also the reason innovation gets cut first when budgets tighten. Most leaders cannot put a number on the value innovation creates, so when finance asks, the room goes quiet.

Simon Hill has spent fifteen years building the tools to end that silence. He is the founder and CEO of Wazoku, the innovation delivery partner behind Total Innovation and the InnoCentive marketplace, and the author of Expected Value: The System to Align Innovation, Strategy, and Value Creation.

In this conversation, Simon and Iliriana unpack:

• Why challenge-driven innovation is the most practical tool a leader has to activate innovators, internal or external
• The xV framework: the four components that let innovation teams, strategy, and finance finally speak the same language
• Why most innovation projects spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars to generate one dollar of expected value, and what to do about it
• Kill credits and zombie projects: why stopping bad investments is as valuable as launching good ones
• The case for intentional deceleration in a culture obsessed with speed
• Why the wall between internal and external innovators is smaller than most leaders think
• How AI has collapsed the cost of feasibility to nearly zero, and what that means for the bottleneck of innovation

• Why Simon believes innovation is not a job but a mindset and a system
• The first-time-public reveal of Wazoku's price point for the full open innovation stack

Simon ends the conversation with a question for our audience, one he himself cannot answer cleanly: Why are so few organizations using open innovation when the cost of deploying it has dropped to almost zero, and the cost of not deploying it has never been higher?

If you are a leader, with or without innovation in your title, working to activate innovators, build innovation programs, or measure what your innovation work is actually worth, this conversation is for you.

About the guest

Simon Hill is founder and CEO of Wazoku, an innovation platform serving NASA, HSBC, Novartis, Shell, the UK Ministry of Defence, and others. He is the author of Expected Value, shortlisted in the top five for Thinkers360 Author of the Year 2026. He is a five-time acquirer, a Founders Pledge member, and the Guardian SME Business Leader of the Year.

About the host

Iliriana Kacaniku is the founder of OpenSolve Studio and host of the Activate Innovation Lounge. She is an innovation strategist with over twenty years of experience helping organizations and their leaders activate innovators, build innovation programs, and create cultures where innovation becomes a practice, not just a moment.

Connect with SimonLinkedIn: Simon Hill on LinkedInWazoku: wazoku.comBook: Expected Value: The System to Align Innovation, Strategy, and Value Creation

Connect with IlirianaLinkedIn: Iliriana Kacaniku on LinkedInWebsite: OpenSolveStudio.comNewsletter: Activate Innovation Newsletter

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Innovation is not failing because organizations lack ideas. It is failing because the system that should turn ideas into outcomes was never built. And every year it stays broken, bad ideas keep dying slowly, at enormous cost, while good ones never make it through.

Dan Toma has spent his career making that cost visible, and fixable. He is the co-founder of Outcome, a consultancy helping large organizations achieve repeatable, measurable, and sustainable innovation-led growth, and the author of three books on corporate innovation, including Innovation Accounting and his latest, Open Innovation Works.

In this conversation, Dan and Iliriana unpack:

• Why the real cost of innovation is not the budget you allocate but the cost of a bad idea that spends three years dying inside your organization
• Why most organizations cannot answer the question: what does innovation mean here, and why that single gap breaks everything downstream
• The hybrid centralized and decentralized innovation structure that works in practice across multiple geographies, and when each model fits
• What a venture board actually is, why its job is to evaluate evidence not judge ideas, and why most organizations get this wrong
• How staged funding and pre-approved budgets remove the CFO bottleneck without removing financial discipline
• Why opening an idea inbox without a process behind it is more damaging to innovation culture than never asking for ideas at all
• The story of three employees across three continents who independently submitted the same idea and were brought together to build it

The question Dan still cannot answer about risk tolerance, corporate culture, and what we are actually asking of the people we hire

Dan ends the conversation with a question for our audience, one he himself cannot resolve cleanly:

Why are we expecting people inside corporations to be innovative, risk-taking, and experimental, when the reason many of them joined a corporation in the first place was for security, stability, and low risk?

If you are a leader, with or without innovation in your title, working to build an innovation system that actually runs year after year and not just when someone is watching, this conversation is for you.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Dan Toma and His Mission

05:08 The Journey to Innovation Consulting

07:34 Building an Innovation System

12:34 Centralized vs. Decentralized Innovation

18:22 Concrete Examples of Innovation Systems

24:54 Best Practices in Collecting Employee Ideas

31:14 The Importance of Actioning Employee Ideas

34:20 The Importance of Employee Engagement in Innovation

41:00 Building a Structured Innovation Process

47:10 The Role of Decision Makers in Innovation

52:49 Creating a Business Case for Innovation

56:21 Integrating AI into the Innovation Process

59:45 The Paradox of Risk in Corporate Innovation

01:03:53 The Importance of a Shared Definition

01:05:15 Creating a Supportive Process for Ideas

01:06:29 The Challenge of Employee Innovation

About the guest:

Dan Toma is co-founder of Outcome, an innovation consultancy working with large organizations across banking, pharma, and energy sectors on multiple continents. He is the author of The Corporate Startup, Innovation Accounting, and Open Innovation Works. He came from the startup world, nearly quit his first corporate innovation role after three weeks, and spent the next decade building the systems that make innovation repeatable.

About the host:

Iliriana Kacaniku is the founder of OpenSolve Studio and host of the Activate Innovation Lounge. She is an innovation strategist with over twenty years of experience helping organizations and their leaders activate innovators, build innovation programs, and create cultures where innovation becomes a practice, not just a moment.