Most companies don’t lack ideas. They lack employees who believe their ideas count.
This week’s four pieces look at why, each from a different angle.
At Orbia, Avi Zoaretz found that employees held back because they feared someone else would take the credit. So his innovation team stays off the stage.
At Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, staff had good ideas but didn’t see themselves as innovators. A team of 1.25 people changed that without a project budget.
At RBI, an award-winning innovation program scored 9.3 out of 10, yet six months later only 41% of participants had fully reached their goal. So the team ran its own program through design thinking.
Finally, Harvard’s Linda Hill shows how one leader’s choice of words told most of his company that innovation wasn’t their job.
In each case, someone first had to see what was holding employees back. What they changed is in the pieces below.
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
Keep Your Innovation Team Off The Stage
At Orbia, the employees behind the ideas present to the CEO, keep the credit and front every new campaign. Engagement sits at 75%, against a benchmark of about 30%.
In more than 12 years of running internal innovation programs, Avi Zoaretz has built stage gates, steering committees, demo days and strong campaign materials, and still found it hard every year to get employees to take part.
Process tells employees how to innovate. In Avi’s experience, whether they actually do depends on what they feel will happen to their ideas. Many fear the innovation team will take the credit, or take the idea itself.
So at HP and Orbia, Avi made a rule: the innovation team stays off the stage. The employees behind the ideas present to the CEO, keep the credit and lead every new campaign. Avi credits that rule with Orbia’s engagement numbers: 75% of employees now engage with the innovation program, against a benchmark of about 30%.
An Innovation Culture Built by 1.25 People
At NHS’s Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, staff had good ideas but didn’t see themselves as innovators. With no project budget, the innovation team set out to change that, giving staff an ideas hub, 30-minute “Time to Think” slots and a faster route through governance.
One of Seamus Coyle’s own innovations took a year to clear every committee it needed. By NHS standards that was fast; in other organizations, comparable ideas took twice as long or stalled entirely.
Clatterbridge had ambition and talented people. What it lacked was a system to collect staff ideas and act on them.
Building that system became the job of two people, whose combined time adds up to 1.25 full-time roles: Simon Bunting and Seamus Coyle. Their mantra came from the 1980s TV show about a small crew working with limited resources: what would the A-Team do?
What they did falls into four moves that other innovation leaders can borrow: clear a faster route through governance, give staff simple ways in, make time for ideas and give executives one shared language.
92% Felt Empowered. 41% Reached Their Goal
RBI’s Innovation School won an award and drew more than 260 applications for 80 places. The team put it through its own design thinking process anyway, and changed four things.
In 2025, 92% of participants in Raiffeisen Bank International's Innovation School said the program left them feeling empowered. Six months later, only 41% said they had fully reached the learning goal they set themselves: one thing they would apply in their own job.
By most other measures, the program was a success. The team could have run the same program again. Instead, the team applied to its own program the user research it teaches. It collected feedback from participants, coaches, line managers and country representatives, then held a core team retro.
The retro produced seven findings, from a goal that asked too much of participants to coaches who struggled to guide their teams. Sarah Straub converted them into four changes to the program.
Why Most Employees Think Innovation Isn’t Their Job
When a leader’s words tell employees that innovation belongs to someone else, their ideas stay hidden. Linda Hill shares why that happens and four moves that bring every employee in.
Every time one leader talked about innovation, he used the word “technology” in the same sentence. Most of his employees worked in other functions, and whenever he talked about innovation, they started planning their day.
Harvard Business School’s Linda Hill has studied how leaders build organizations that innovate again and again. Splitting a company into innovators and executors, she says, is “the kiss of death” for that goal.
Her research points to four moves that bring every employee in: defining innovation as anything new and useful to the organization, building teams around each person’s strengths, showing people how their daily work connects to the company’s purpose, and explaining the rules along with the reasons behind them.
What’s happening @ Novum
How can organizations turn foresight insights into concrete opportunities and experiments that drive action?
Led by member Sören Jens Lauinger, Foresight and Innovation Manager at Aesculap, on Wednesday November 18th we’ll explore how AI can make foresight faster, more accessible, and more actionable.
Drawing on a real-world experience where an extensive future of surgery study produced accurate predictions but led to little action, Sören will share a practical approach to bringing foresight closer to business decisions. We'll review how teams can combine human expertise with AI-generated scenarios, move from trends to future scenarios in just half a day, and narrow down a broad set of opportunities into a few concrete experiments.
We'll close with a discussion on an important question: When would you trust AI with your foresight work?
Curious to join this session, part of a dedicated track on “Foresight & Insights”? Join the Novum Society - check this page for more info.
If you try just one thing from this edition, make it the easiest one.
Add a line to your email signature that lets anyone book 30 minutes with you to talk through an idea. At Clatterbridge, Simon calls these Time to Think slots, and staff booked more than 112 of them in 18 months. And before your next idea challenge launches, ask yourself Avi’s question: who will be standing in front of the CEO?
Next week we’ll talk partnerships. See you then.
Hans
Hans Balmaekers
Founder, the Compass and Novum
