On paper, it was working. But the submissions were slowing, the implementation pipeline was thinning, and the energy that had driven the program through COVID had quietly drained away. The team could have tweaked the platform. They could have launched a re-engagement campaign.

Instead, Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager of the iD8 Program and Colleague Innovation, did something simpler and more direct: she went and asked the people who knew the program best what was actually going on.

What came back reshaped everything— how ideas enter the system, how the business commits resources, how contributors get recognized, and how the team measures its own health. This is the story of how one innovation manager used direct conversation to turn a stalling program into a stronger one.

Before iD8 existed as a formal program, innovation at TD was already happening, just not in a coordinated way. Across the bank's business lines, small groups of employees had started solving problems on their own: fixing processes, removing friction for customers, collaborating without anyone directing them to. This was organic, grassroots energy, scattered across retail branches, contact centers, insurance, and wealth management.

In 2019, leadership formalized these activities. TD built a centralized ideation platform called iD8 and assembled a dedicated team to run it. Any employee, from frontline teller to C-suite executive, can submit an idea. A network of "committed champions" in each line of business receives ideas, evaluates them against business priorities, and connects promising ones to the teams that can implement them. They function as the connective tissue between a frontline employee's observation and the business line that can act on it. Over time, the community grew to 10,000 active contributors and 1,000 "iD8 influencers" who consistently championed innovation across the bank.

One critical early design choice iD8 made for their program was that anyone submitting an idea didn’t mean that they had to implement it. Many of the best ideas come from frontline staff who can't leave their day jobs to manage a project. iD8 keeps submitters connected to the journey of their idea while the business line's own teams drive implementation.

The program gained serious momentum during COVID. The pandemic disrupted every process and every customer interaction across the bank. Submissions surged and implementations accelerated as teams raced to adapt. But by 2022, the COVID energy had faded. Submissions slowed. The implementation pipeline thinned. Annual submissions, which had been running at 16,000 to 18,000 across the bank, were trending downward. The architecture hadn't changed. The platform still worked, the champions were still in place, but the numbers told a clear story: something had shifted.

This is the point where the iD8 team made a decision that shaped everything that followed. Rather than adjusting the platform or launching a re-engagement campaign, they went directly to the people who had powered the program from the start, through a practice they call "feedback tours."

In late 2022, the iD8 team organized feedback tours across the bank's major business lines: retail banking, small business, insurance, and others. For each line of business, they selected 25 to 30 of the most consistent contributors and put them in a room with the senior executives of their division.

What came back was surprisingly actionable. It was not a list of complaints, but two clear patterns, repeated across every session.

The first was exhaustion. People had poured everything into COVID-era problem-solving and simply needed a break. The surge of ideas during the pandemic wasn't free: it came at a cost, and by 2022 the bill had arrived.

The second was silence from the program itself. Not rejection; contributors understood that not every idea would move forward. What they couldn't accept was submitting an idea and hearing nothing back. Which ideas got implemented? Why those and not others? And when their contributions did make a difference, why did recognition only arrive as a generic email six months later?

There was also a third finding that was easier to miss because the people affected weren't in the room. The committed champions —the volunteers and staff who triaged every incoming idea, categorized it, matched it to a business priority, and routed it to the right team— were quietly burning out. Every one of those submissions needed someone to evaluate it, decide where it belonged, and figure out how it ranked against everything else in the queue. That workload had become unsustainable.

At TD Bank, that middle layer was under strain, and without it, the system couldn’t function.

What the iD8 team took from these sessions was that the architecture was sound. The gap was in how the program communicated with and recognized the people powering it. In light of what the innovation team heard, three structural changes followed.

The feedback tours surfaced a lack of direction for the contributors. They had no way of knowing whether the problem they'd identified was even a priority for their business line. And the champions processing those ideas were drowning in volume with no way to focus it.

Open ideation, where anyone can submit an idea about anything at any time, had been the default since launch. It's inclusive and it surfaces ideas nobody expected. But it also places enormous pressure on the champions checking those ideas, and contributors were also shooting in the dark.

To tackle this problem, starting in 2023, the iD8 team introduced challenge-driven innovation as a complement to the open ideation track. Instead of collecting ideas about everything, each business line sponsors a specific challenge:

The business tells the iD8 community what problem needs solving, and the community responds. It’s important to note that open ideation continues alongside the new track and still generates the majority of ideas. The two tracks serve different purposes: open ideation surfaces the unexpected, while challenges focus energy on what the business has committed to solving.

To understand why committed funding matters, consider what came before — and the lesson TD learned the hard way. Up to that point, TD had also run hackathons — the kind most large organizations will recognize. The team would pick a trending industry topic, assemble executive judges, and invite employees to pitch ideas. The energy was real. The pitches were exciting. But there was no pre-existing commitment from any business line to fund or implement the results. After the event, the winning ideas would land on someone's desk with a vague promise to "see what we can do."

Most went nowhere. The people who pitched them noticed, and the next time a hackathon came around, fewer of them showed up. Vlora distilled this into a principle the team now designs around.

Individual business lines at TD now run 10 to 12 challenges per year on focused, practical problems. For example, Canadian Personal Banking issued a challenge around opening and closing procedures at retail branches, a daily friction point for frontline managers. Around 80 to 90 ideas came back. They implemented 25 to 30, mostly process improvements requiring minimal investment but making an immediate difference in daily work.

This surfaced another learning for the iD8 program: not every challenge needs to be a major strategic initiative. Some of the strongest results come from targeting small, specific operational problems where the people closest to the work already know what needs fixing.

For example, one colleague manages high net worth estate services at TD. She watched grieving families sit through an hour of paperwork during one of the worst moments of their lives, and realized that two related documents could be consolidated into one. She was the one that championed the change. Due to her contribution, processing time dropped from an hour to 25 minutes. It now supports 23,000 clients a year and frees up 10,000 hours of capacity across the bank. One person, one observation, one fix, all because the program gave her a path to act on it.

Introducing challenge-based innovation alongside open ideation addressed the exhaustion and gave contributors a clearer target. The next problem to solve was the silence. Contributors didn't just want to hear back on individual ideas. They wanted to know that showing up consistently, over months and years, actually registered with the organization. When the only signal they got was an email six months later, it told them it didn't. Recognition needed to be immediate, personal, and layered.

In light of this, TD built five layers of recognition, each addressing a different need:

Perhaps the most telling moment, the one that showed recognition had become part of the program's identity rather than just its process, came when TD hit the 100,000-idea mark. They turned it into a physical display at Union Station in Toronto, where small light bulbs represented each idea submitted since 2019. It made visible what incremental innovation looks like when it accumulates at enterprise scale, and it gave the entire iD8 community a public moment of recognition.

Not every innovation program needs all five layers. At TD, each one addressed a specific gap the feedback tours had surfaced.

As the program evolved, and as the feedback tours made clear how much had been left out, TD also had to rethink how it measured its own health.

The metrics that mattered at launch weren't the ones that mattered later — and without the right ones, the shift had been hard to spot. Vlora describes the evolution: "When we first started, a key metric was the number of submissions because it showed quality engagement. As the program matured, the rate of implementation became a key metric. We're also leaning more into the value piece of innovation. You could be solving a lot of great problems, but if they're not a priority for your organization, you may be spending resources on something that may not be top priority."

That progression is made visible through a maturity-metric arc:

On AI-assisted prioritization specifically, TD is exploring how AI can segment incoming ideas, spot patterns across submissions, and prioritize more efficiently.

At the same time, the ideas coming through the platform are shifting: contributors are proposing increasingly sophisticated AI-powered solutions that wouldn't have appeared even two years ago. Vlora's team is also working to push the implementation rate beyond its current 10-13%, with clearer storytelling and stronger engagement as the main levers.

The shift from tracking implementation volume to tracking value alignment is where the challenge model closed the loop: when the business defines the problem upfront, the ideas that come back already align to what matters.

100,000 ideas. 10,000 implementations. Five years of evolution. Along the way, TD restructured how ideas enter the system, how contributors get recognized, and how the program measures its own success. The challenge model came from contributors saying they wanted their energy to point at something the business had committed to solving. The recognition layers came from people saying they wanted to know their contributions registered. Each shift traces back to the feedback tours and what surfaced in those conversations.

And sometimes the strongest proof comes unexpectedly. The idea Vlora is most proud of recently had nothing to do with technology or process optimization. It came from colleagues who noticed something about new hires that HR strategy had missed: in a 95,000-person organization, knowing how to do your job is not the same as knowing how to navigate the place. New hires crave connection, orientation, a sense of where they fit earlier in the onboarding process. Through iD8, colleagues proposed an onboarding program that checks in with new hires at regular intervals throughout their first months. The outcome: stronger early connections, improved colleague experience, and measurably better retention. It won TD's top innovation award for 2025.

Overall, iD8's pivot from an open ideation platform running on goodwill to a structured, challenge-driven program with layered recognition and evolving metrics is a great example of how one innovation manager and her team turned a stalling program around.

The structural changes matter, and they travel well. But the real starting point was a decision to sit down with the people who knew the program best and hear what they had to say.

How Chick-fil-A rebuilt an innovation culture that its own success had quietly crowded out.

In 2008, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy watched companies thrive through the economic downturn by investing in innovation while everyone else pulled back. He introduced a new core value, "we pursue what's next," that shifted innovation from a small dedicated team's responsibility to a shared one across the entire organization. Chick-fil-A built a centralized innovation services team, launched an ambassadors program, developed a six-stage innovation process built on design thinking, and wove innovation into performance reviews across the organization.

For years, this setup worked. Then, the business got really successful: restaurants hit record performance, the quick-service sector flattened, and the organizational instinct shifted toward protecting what was working.

Innovation was still a core value on paper, but the pressure for operational excellence was crowding it out in practice.

Patrick Miles, Senior Project Lead of Innovation Services at Chick-fil-A, noticed engagement in innovation was dropping when the annual staff survey came back. The scores on one particular question were stark: staff felt they had little time and opportunity to think, innovate, and grow. They were simply too busy keeping a thriving business running smoothly.

His team dug into what was behind that finding. Staff had limited time to focus beyond their immediate responsibilities, and financial pressures were tightening every team's focus further. But most importantly, employees in roles like support call centers had never been shown how innovation connected to what they did day to day, so they assumed it wasn't part of their job. Even those who wanted to participate had limited awareness of what opportunities existed.

Patrick's team used what they call “the culture wheel”, a diagnostic framework that maps innovation culture across belief, capability, and structure, to pinpoint where things were thinning. All three were degrading simultaneously, so they designed three initiatives to address each one.

To rebuild belief, they created the Pursue What's Next Summit, a full-day, on-campus innovation conference, free for any staff member. The 2024 inaugural edition was themed "Look to the Horizon": how might we help staff lean into what is ahead with courage and curiosity? Breakouts covered everything from shame as a barrier to innovation to generative AI exploration. A staff panel shared stories of how they had leveraged failure to learn and grow. Between sessions, "Conversation Corners" gave people informal space to connect, with bracelets encouraging the adoption of innovation behaviors.

Out of roughly 3,000 staff, 970 signed up, more than double the 400 the team had projected. In the post-event survey, 132 out of about 200 respondents said they were "very likely" to approach their work differently. One attendee captured the shift: "The morning keynote really brought home why innovation is important to Chick-fil-A and how that is also my role."

To rebuild capability, Patrick's team developed a free Innovation Practitioner Certification. The certification runs five to fifteen hours a month, is cohort-based, deliberately cross-functional, and culminates in a live project rather than a simulation. Graduates carry the certification on their internal profiles, so that when teams across the business need someone with innovation experience, they can find certified practitioners and bring them in immediately.

To rebuild structure, they tackled the gap between knowing the innovation process existed and knowing how to use it. Chick-fil-A's six-stage innovation process had been represented across the company's headquarters by colored chevron arrows. Staff recognized them, but most couldn't tell you what actually happened at each stage. In response, Patrick's team built a digital Guide to Innovation: a single source of truth hosted on the company intranet, with detailed steps, checklists, templates, and tool integrations that made the process not just visible, but something any team could pick up and work through on their own.

The early signs suggest the three initiatives are helping turn this lack of engagement around. The summit is now on a biannual cadence. The certification already has waiting lists for future cohorts. And Patrick points to broader shifts in what's emerging across the business: teams experimenting with new restaurant designs, a tabletop family game system that brings Chick-fil-A into customers' homes, and pop-up innovation projects focused on often-overlooked groups like urban third-party delivery drivers.

The parallel to TD Bank's iD8 program is interesting. TD rebuilt their program from the ground up. Chick-fil-A added new infrastructure to one that was already in place but losing ground. Different responses, but the same diagnosis from Vlora and Patrick: although the architecture was sound, engagement was dropping anyway. Both proved that when you stop focusing on the system and start focusing on the people inside it, they show up. 970 of them, in Chick-fil-A's case, on the very first try.

What Zurich's Joel Agard found when he counted the initiatives that had actually scaled— and the four-step fix that changed the math.

In 2018, Joel Agard, Group Head of Innovation at Zurich Insurance, built the organization’s Innovation Championship from scratch: a global open innovation contest that pairs startups with Zurich's business units to solve insurance challenges across 40+ markets. By its fifth edition, the Championship had attracted over 3,300 startup applications, partnered with ventures across 30 countries, and had board-level sponsorship. But when Joel counted the initiatives that had actually been adopted by a business unit or scaled to a second market, the number was far smaller than expected. Plenty of startups were entering the competition, but not enough were coming out the other side as business results.

The previous articles in this newsletter explored how TD Bank and Chick-fil-A's innovation programs decayed from the inside. Joel's problem was different. The Championship wasn't losing people or energy, but it was structured so that startups entered before the business had defined what problem it needed solved. His team restructured the entire model into a “venture client” engine, where every engagement starts with a validated business problem.

The pivot came down to four changes: problem before startup, fit before reputation, commitment before pilot, evidence before scale. Each one is something you can test against your own program.

Before any startup enters the conversation, a business unit must articulate a specific problem connected to Zurich's strategic priorities. Joel's team runs a problem deep-dive to confirm the need is real, scoped, and worth investing in. If the problem doesn't survive that process, no startup gets scouted.

The deep-dive also builds in decision points where the team can conclude the problem is better addressed by an internal development team or by purchasing an existing product from an established provider. Not every business problem requires a startup. Reaching that conclusion early saves months.

Once a problem is validated, Joel's team proactively searches for the startup best positioned to solve it, whether or not that startup has ever heard of Zurich's program. When his team started benchmarking against the specific problem rather than general impressiveness, they caught gaps the old process missed: technology that wasn't mature enough for Zurich's standards, teams lacking domain expertise, or products that didn't fit the required geographies.

This shift is why Zurich's portfolio grew to 50+ ongoing collaborations, with 18 scaled beyond their original business unit.

The most persistent reason initiatives died wasn't that pilots failed. It was that no one had agreed to act on the results. Joel now requires local and global decision-makers to formally endorse every initiative before his team supports it. No endorsement, no support from the innovation team.

But commitment alone wasn't enough. Even when business leaders were willing, they pushed back with a familiar excuse: we don't have the people to run this. To tackle this, Joel created an Entrepreneurs in Residence program: 50 high-potential employees from across the globe were assigned to lead innovation projects for six months. Some of these employees were promoted; one even ended up in the CEO's office.

Zurich runs every initiative through three validation gates: desirability (does the business actually want this?), feasibility (can it be built within Zurich's technical and regulatory environment?), and viability (does the business case hold up?). Of roughly 3,000 initiatives analyzed per year, around 300 enter the funnel. A fraction make it through all three gates. At each one, the team chooses one of four outcomes:

→ Continue: evidence supports the startup
→ Build: the problem is real, but an internal team solves it better
→ Buy: an established vendor already has a solution
→ Kill: evidence doesn't support continued investment

If "kill" isn't a real option at every gate, your process will slowly fill with initiatives that no one wants to cancel but no one is willing to fund.

Joel treats early kills as a success metric. Of the initiatives that make it through all three gates, 80% exit with adoption in their first country or a follow-up purchase order. That rate is high because the bad fits were stopped at earlier gates (as we explored in a previous edition of the Compass).

The combined effect of these four changes? Eighteen initiatives have scaled beyond their first business unit. Ten have been identified as globally scalable, with Zurich building delivery infrastructure to push them into all markets. Some have led to acquisitions and joint ventures. One early collaboration from the US market is still generating multi-million dollars in operating profit years later.

The pipeline now feeds directly into strategic planning: five regional CEOs, the group CEO, and the group CFO use it to steer investment decisions across the business. Through this pivot, the program finally produced the results it was originally created for.

That’s it for today.

Hope you enjoyed this fourth edition of the Compass. Next time, we’ll discover how sustainability can become a catalyst for net-new growth rather than a constraint, by building ventures that solve real user needs and accelerate circularity at scale.

Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Chief @ Innov8rs

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