Activate Innovation Lounge

Open Solve Studio LLC
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Activate Innovation Lounge features real stories from leaders who activate innovators, innovation, and innovation culture within and beyond their organizations. Through conversations with innovation leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs, we explore how organizations unlock the potential of their people, open up to outside ideas, and build cultures where innovation does not just happen once but keeps happening. Each episode shares wisdom about shaping the processes and structures that work, the challenges overcome, and the lessons learned to sustain innovation as a practice, not just a moment.

  1. 26 Jun

    Episode 16: Innovating Engine can only be built from within with Ben Bensaou

    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.

  2. 12 Jun

    Episode 15: Why do organizations keep missing these innovators already inside with Roel De Vries

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

  3. 5 Jun

    Episode 14: Challenges bring to light what innovation is important, with Vlora Muslimi, TD Bank

    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 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

  4. 29 May

    Episode 13: How to Activate the Hidden Innovators in Your Organization, with Jan Fischer (bonus)

    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.

  5. 22 May

    Episode 12: Marta Jakab on Why problems matter more than ideas in corporate innovation

    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.

  6. 15 May

    Episode 11: How leaders can (and should sustain) grassroots innovation

    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

  7. 11 May ·  Bonus

    Who knows best what needs to be solved?

    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.

  8. 8 May

    Episode 10: Why should leaders activate grassroots innovators with Alexis Samuel

    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

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Activate Innovation Lounge features real stories from leaders who activate innovators, innovation, and innovation culture within and beyond their organizations. Through conversations with innovation leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs, we explore how organizations unlock the potential of their people, open up to outside ideas, and build cultures where innovation does not just happen once but keeps happening. Each episode shares wisdom about shaping the processes and structures that work, the challenges overcome, and the lessons learned to sustain innovation as a practice, not just a moment.

Information

  • Creator
    Open Solve Studio LLC
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Open Solve Studio LLC
  • Show Website
    Activate Innovation Lounge