If your innovation team delivers, it usually gets more scope as a reward. At ILUNION Hotels, each time that happened, the way innovation was organized stopped working and had to be rebuilt.
Most corporates treat social impact and operational performance as separate tracks. One gets the budget, the other gets the CSR report. ILUNION Hotels, a Spanish hotel chain, never had that option.
The company operates under a founding mandate from ILUNION Group and the Social ONCE Group to integrate people with disabilities and other vulnerable groups into every level of the business. As Jose Ángel Preciados puts it: "business success means full integration of all people with disabilities and all people at risk of exclusion into the labor market."
Today, 37% of the workforce has a disability, and another 21% comes from other vulnerable groups. That mandate turned every operational problem into an innovation problem. Staffing, training, room cleaning, workload distribution, guest and employee experience: all of it had to be solved within the mandate.
Over 12 years, the company has run innovation through three operating models. A founder-driven model converted the first hotel into a Special Employment Center. A centralized-hybrid model built the operational tools. An open, decentralized model took innovation into every department and out to an ecosystem of external partners. Each one delivered, then hit a limit its structure couldn't get past.
Along the way, the company went from a single pilot hotel to 44 innovation projects, 15 Special Employment Centers, a new restaurant concept, a new "employee at the core" people management system, and 9 international awards across 33 hotels.
Limit One: Capacity
Until 2019, the company operated a founder-driven model that converted the first hotels into Special Employment Centers and built the governance and mentoring systems from scratch. When the general manager at the time saw that the hotels needed better tools for employee and customer experience, he pushed into digital transformation, with the goal of mapping the entire customer journey and digitizing the processes behind it.
That effort fizzled out almost immediately, due to lack of resources. Innovation leadership for the digital push was the responsibility of two people in the technology department. Both had technical skills but limited experience managing innovation programs, and the capacity to drive dozens of projects simply wasn't there. Representatives from other departments rarely participated, which meant the solutions those two technologists designed often couldn't scale beyond a single property. Under this model, the team managed roughly 10 projects per year.
This is something many innovation leaders face daily: the small team that proved the concept can't scale it. The people and the ideas don't change — but the operating model isn't built for the next level of ambition.
How they restructured: from founder-led to centralized-hybrid
To fix the bottleneck, the company brought in a new innovation director and made one structural change: no project could run inside a single department anymore. The innovation department still led, but every project had to include people from operations, people management, technology, and whichever other areas the problem touched. Before the restructure, two technologists designed solutions and tried to get others to adopt them. After it, the people who would use the solution were in the room from the start.
The new model produced 44 innovation projects. Two of them show how the workforce itself shaped what got built.
What Stiqk replaced: manual housekeeping across 33 hotels
One of the 44 projects was Stiqk, a system the innovation team built to digitize room-cleaning coordination across the chain. The problem was that housekeeping coordination, workload assignments, and data recording across the chain were all done by hand. But for a workforce where a large proportion of employees had disabilities, those manual processes created errors, uneven workloads, and physical strain that a conventional hotel might absorb but the chain couldn't.
Stiqk automated real-time coordination between housekeeping and reception, generated productivity reports, and distributed workloads based on actual room status. Stiqk cut daily assignment time by 85%, eliminated data entry errors entirely, improved workload distribution by 25%, and reduced workplace injuries by 10%. The system is still running across the chain today. And when employees were later surveyed about the most useful technology in their daily work, Stiqk was the most cited tool.
Room 501: an accessible hotel room that doesn't look like one
Room 501 was an innovation lab built inside a working hotel room at ILUNION Atrium Hotel in Madrid. The brief was to build a fully accessible room for guests with any type of disability that doesn't look or feel like a medical facility. The hotel director described the brief as incorporating auxiliary elements invisibly, meeting different needs depending on the guest's functional diversity, age, or situation. And Eurostat indicates that 24% of the population in Europe over 16 has a disability, which means universal design at this level serves a far larger market than most hotel operators assume.
The team built a room with sensor-activated doors, folding-bar wardrobes, beds with booster seats (which also simplified cleaning for housekeeping staff), automatic-controlled curtains and voice-controlled televisions, non-slip bathroom floors, and large-key phones with light-based alerts. The design was meant to be universal, deployable across different hotel types and categories.
By 2022, one department managing 44 projects across 33 hotels had become the new limit. For the second time in eight years, the structure couldn't keep up.
Limit Two: Reach
By the end of 2022, the company hired Carlos Bello to be the new innovation director. Upon joining, he conducted a diagnostic through an employee survey and joint assessment.
The survey went to all 1,800 employees. 604 responded, a 34% response rate, more than double the 15% typical for internal surveys. The results painted a clear picture: 43% of employees didn't know the innovation strategy, 38% couldn't name a single innovation role or structure, 60% were unaware of industry trends, and only 9% associated innovation with accessibility and inclusion, the company's founding differentiator, because the inclusion model was so embedded in daily operations that employees no longer recognized it as innovation. The culture was strong: 88% said they felt comfortable sharing ideas. But the structure was invisible: only 5% would bring those ideas to the innovation area. 61% went to their department head instead.
In short, the culture was strong but the structure was weak. The innovation energy was alive at the edges, in department meetings and daily problem-solving, but the strategy, the roles, and the ecosystem were invisible to most of the organization.
Once these findings were in, they didn't launch a new program, nor hire more people. Instead, they redesigned the operating model for the third time.
What the redesign looks like: InnoLeaders, ISO 56001, and Transforma
2023 saw the launch of #InnovACTION, an operating model built on three principles:
Open: external partners became part of the innovation process. The team partnered with Les Roches, an international tourism school, to create the first Innovation Barometer for the hotel sector, benchmarking innovation maturity across more than 40 international companies. Startups, technology centers, and business schools entered the project pipeline.
Hybrid: functional areas worked on projects outside their own domain, in cross-functional teams that included all affected stakeholders. The Our Way project used this approach to co-create a new people management model through Design Thinking sessions with every department.
Decentralized: each area designated an InnoLeader, an innovation ambassador who drove innovation within that function and coordinated with the central innovation department through bimonthly committees. The innovation department shifted from leading every project to facilitating, integrating the ecosystem, communicating, building advanced competitive intelligence capability, and leading only the most disruptive cross-cutting work.
This switch, from "innovation runs all projects" to "innovation facilitates and integrates," is one many corporate innovation functions resist, because a lot of the time it means giving up control. At ILUNION Hotels, the centralized model had already proven that one department couldn't cover the scope. So the choice was limited: either they decentralize, or accept that innovation would only happen where the department could directly reach.
In 2025, the company adopted ISO 56001 for innovation management, creating a consistent framework for how projects were started, evaluated, and scaled. The Transforma platform gave employees a channel to respond to defined innovation challenges, typically run once a year for about a month. The purpose was less about generating new project ideas (the company already had more than it could handle) and more about keeping the innovation culture visible to employees who weren't directly involved in projects. Each challenge produced a winner that got piloted, though not every pilot succeeded: a water-saving shower timer, for instance, was tested and dropped after guests rejected it.
Also by 2025, nine international innovation awards in two years recognized solutions co-created with ecosystem partners. The Innovation Master Plan formalized the roadmap. And the next limit, predictably, is how to expand beyond what the current model was designed for, in order to focus on the inclusion of all vulnerable groups in the next phase of the company strategy.
The Next Limit Is Already Forming
The current Innovation Master Plan runs through 2029. If the past 12 years are a guide, the current model will hit its limit before then. Every expansion, from one hotel to 33 and from internal teams to an ecosystem of universities, startups, and business schools, has demanded a more capable innovation function.
That limit is already showing. The decentralized model gave InnoLeaders the autonomy to drive innovation in their own areas, and many took that freedom further than the model was designed for. As Carlos puts it: "when you give someone the power to innovate, they may think they can do whatever they want, and that the innovation department is only for solving problems that can not be managed by them."
Each model broke in a different place. The founder-driven model ran out of capacity: two people with technical skills, roughly 10 projects a year, and other departments rarely at the table. The centralized model ran out of reach: one department couldn't cover 44 projects across 33 hotels, and most employees couldn't see the strategy or the structure behind it. The decentralized model fixed both, and now faces a question of control: once every area can innovate, what does the central team still own?
Each fix matched the limit it hit. When capacity ran out, ILUNION put every affected department into every project. When reach ran out, it gave every department its own InnoLeader. The next model depends on how it answers the control question.
