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. I...

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...

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 Act...

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...

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 organizati...

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...

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...

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 carrie...

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 part...

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 organ...

About this episode: Every organization should have its own garage. Not just a physical space, but a program that allocates resources and time for employees to tinker, experiment, and push their own boundaries by default, not by exception. That belief is what brought Ed Essey to the Activate Innovation Lounge. Ed has spent over a decade inside Microsoft Garage, one of the most recognizable internal...

When Elaine Chin designs a challenge, she is not just writing a problem statement. She is translating years of internal work into a question the world can answer. In this episode of Activate Innovation Lounge, Elaine walks us through the art and science of challenge design, from identifying the right problem to sequencing solutions, setting prize incentives, and managing what happens after the awa...

What if the reason your innovation efforts keep failing is not because you lack ideas, but because you are asking less questions than you should?  Stephen Shapiro, author and creator of a 20,000 person innovation practice at Accenture, joins the Activate Innovation Lounge to unpack why organizations default to suggestion boxes, how confirmation bias sabotages even the best solutions, and why the b...

In this episode, I talk to Jon A. Fredrickson, pioneer in open innovation and founder of Einstein's 55, who’s dedicated most of his career to working Fortune 500 companies, government, and nonprofit organizations leverage open innovation challenges to source innovative solutions and innovators. In this episode, he reveals why most organizations misdiagnose their biggest challenges and how lead...

In this conversation, Jan Fischer discusses the critical role of employee innovation in organizations and how to create a culture that fosters creativity and engagement. He emphasizes that innovation is not just the responsibility of a select few but should involve everyone in the organization. The discussion also covers the importance of overcoming barriers to innovation, the impact of AI on inno...

Leaders complain they don't have enough ideas. Yet every organization is full of people naturally full of ideas. So what's locking those ideas up? ⁠Robyn Bolton⁠ is Chief Navigator at MileZero and former innovation leader at Procter & Gamble and Innosight, Clayton Christensen's firm. She's discovered through her research that only 0.002% of ideas become million dollar businesse...

In this conversation, Iliriana Kaçaniku and Eugene Ivanov explore the evolution and significance of open innovation and crowdsourcing. They discuss the differences between co-creation and crowdsourcing, the importance of internal crowdsourcing, and the challenges faced by smaller organizations in adopting innovative practices. The role of AI in enhancing innovation processes is also examined, alon...

I launched Activate Innovation Lounge with a single mission: uncover how organizations create the conditions that unleash innovation talent already within their teams. In each episode, I sit down with leaders who are building the structures, processes, and incentives that turn latent potential into breakthrough solutions. We explore what worked, what backfired, and the specific conditions that mad...