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 sessionThe SparkPit (MatchBox Pitch) sessionThe Liberty Global YouTube channel with further MatchBox and SparkPit recordingsAnd 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 LearnHow ID8 started organically from employees fixing things "side of the desk," and what made leadership formalize itWhy the people closest to the friction are the best source of problems worth solvingThe shift from an open idea box to challenge-based innovation, and what triggered it after the pandemicWhy the promise of implementation has to be real, or participation diesThe difference between "small i" incremental ideas and "big I" ideas, and why their paths divergeWhy the internal crowd often beats an external one, thanks to tacit knowledgeWhy the best solution to a problem frequently comes from outside the team that owns itThe critical role of leadership, and why it must cascade through every layerHow 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.