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 organizationWhy most organizations cannot answer the question: what does innovation mean here, and why that single gap breaks everything downstreamThe hybrid centralized and decentralized innovation structure that works in practice across multiple geographies, and when each model fitsWhat a venture board actually is, why its job is to evaluate evidence not judge ideas, and why most organizations get this wrongHow staged funding and pre-approved budgets remove the CFO bottleneck without removing financial disciplineWhy opening an idea inbox without a process behind it is more damaging to innovation culture than never asking for ideas at allThe story of three employees across three continents who independently submitted the same idea and were brought together to build itThe 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.
