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.