Coby Skonord founded IdeaWake, an innovation crowdsourcing platform. He addresses common misconceptions about innovation in organizations, the role of technology leaders, and the importance of integrating innovation into company culture. Koby also shares insights on overcoming budget constraints, navigating security challenges, and the impact of AI on innovation processes. He emphasizes the need for a sustainable innovation culture that is measured and integrated into the organization's goals.

Timestamps

00:00 – Leaving EY to Build Ideawake

02:35 - Why Innovation Fails Inside Big Organizations

03:47 - Building a Culture That Enables Innovation

05:26 - Turning Ideas into Impact

09::38 - Innovation in Healthcare and Regulated Industries

10:37 - The CTO’s Role in Driving Innovation

13:50 - Escaping the Budget Trap

19:35 - Breaking Through Enterprise Barriers

26:36 - The Future of Innovation and the Role of AI

About Coby

Coby Skonord helps corporate innovation, improvement, and HR teams more effectively tap into the wisdom of employee ideas.

Over the last decade he's led the team at Ideawake, an innovation management platform used by thousands of companies like KraftHeinz, SiriusXM, and Jason's Deli power their employee ideas program focused on growing revenue, reducing costs, and improving efficiency.

Where to find Coby

• Website: https://ideawake.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coby-skonord/

What if the next breakthrough in your company isn't coming from your executive team or an outside consultant, but it actually comes from somebody that's on the front line, like a nurse, an engineer, or a security guard? Our guest today is Coby Skonord, who left a big four accounting firm to build Ideawake, an innovation crowdsourcing platform used by enterprises across multiple industries. Coby, welcome, and it's really nice to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Mark. Appreciate it.

Sure. To start, And I like that story. Take us back to the first day you started at a big four company, and then you decided to just walk away and build your own startup to build Ideawake. Cool story. Sell us.

Yeah, so, I mean... Always was both my parents are entrepreneurs.

So Had the bug, I guess, from an early age, just watching them build their own companies. And like you said, was originally going, did the internship with Ernst & Young at the time, EY (now Ernst & Young), and got a full-time job with them.

And then first day of training, put in my two weeks. Really was passionate about like enabling entrepreneurs originally. And giving them the tools they needed to build out new ideas. And so I just took the leap, figured if I was early, in my early 20s doing it. That it would be, you know, well, the lowest risk possible at that point in life. And, Yeah, 12 years later now, have a lot of gray hair, almost white. Mostly driven by the company, I think, but it's been a lot of learning and I've had a lot of.

Fun doing it. Nice. And you talk about supporting entrepreneurs. You Ideawake folks is really on building out innovation. I know from my own past that innovation, especially in large organizations, is really hard.

So what's the biggest misconceptions that you see that organizations still have about innovation, how it actually works?

Great question. So, Basically, what we started with was with entrepreneurs, then we started working with enterprise about two years in, completely separate story. But at this point, we've done work with over a thousand corporates now from 100 person startups all the way through like Fortune 100 companies. The biggest misconception, I would say, is that buying a tool for saying like, hey, we need to be innovative and starting a department with a team of one is going to result in actual measurable outcomes. Really what it comes from is not the tool itself or having a title within the organization that you can search that there's like an innovation department. It's really actually integrating it. It's not rocket science. It's integrating the act, like just like anything else when you have reviews like annually, It's simply putting in innovation metrics into the primary business units so that they treat innovation differently. As something that they are measured on versus something that's going to take away from them getting their next promotion or hitting their metrics at the end of the day, at the end of the.

Year. I get that. And still, I mean, you have big businesses like, you probably know what Skunk Works, right? Big businesses that consciously separate innovation because all the people in the madness of every day of their work, they just don't find the time. And innovation usually is something that Well, it happens maybe Friday afternoon or not at all. It gets just pushed back because there's no bandwidth. How do you address that when you have innovation in the departments?

Yeah, so it really comes back to, and I'll have different responses for different things, but really like the environment or the culture, a lot of folks will say they want to build innovation culture when they reach out to us, right? A culture is simply the math, like the culture. Collective incentives inside of the organization in order to drive the company forward. And so those are the easiest way to measure culture. Is instead of talking about it, putting it into things that you're measuring. Right. Not just from a standpoint of the team of one, but across your business units and departments. And it is important to have a separate place for innovation to play. But at the end of the day, when you come up with new concepts, those concepts in order to add value and ROI have to go back into departments, right?

So in order for them to go back into departments, the department has to work with you to implement And that is like the main area where we see the clash. And it happens, I mean, universally across we're in 17 different industries happens at every industry, every company size. It's universal.

So I would say that like in terms of, People having the time, they'll make the time if they're measured on it. And in order to actually make stuff happen, when you get actual ROI out the back end, it's the same answer.

Okay, makes sense. So, and before we go on with all my other innovation and technology questions, tell me a bit about Ideawake. What does it actually do and how does it support enterprises?

Yeah, so a couple of, Overall solution of Ideawake, the company, two different main product offerings. One is at the fuzzy front end of innovation.

So it's a tool plus innovation. Consulting in a process that allows you to basically build that culture of innovation up front and build the, we call them enabling events, but it's a software. You can do innovation challenges or campaigns, hackathons, shark tanks, that front end of the process where you can take, I mean, Either our smallest company is a hundred folks. Largest company is 150,000.

So you can run a large scale campaign or a small scale one. I've got a lot of feedback from folks in a targeted way. Get that feedback to a point where you take a bunch of noise and create some signal out of it, and then assign team members to make it happen. Most importantly, allowing you to communicate in a personalized way at scale back to the submitters and increasing transparency. That's the main thing we offer is providing transparency so you keep the program high engagement long-term. After you run your first initial push. Because the number one reason that folks stop sharing ideas is because They don't hear feedback on an idea they shared previously. Once again, none of this is rocket science, but we have the primary data that backs it up from the platform and our own research. The secondary offering, what we found is that companies have a very difficult time once they have the ideas and the shortlisted list. How do they actually get those to happen?

Like I said, it really comes down to the expectations and incentive structures inside of the organization. But we have an accelerator program that's a curriculum, coaching, and a process behind that once ideas are shortlisted. Called the Idea Box, where we take cohorts through like a four-week program or an eight-week program. To build out a business case, a basic prototype, and then pitch it to leadership. I'm like a shark tank or not.

Cool, because indeed that was my next question is, raising ideas or bringing up ideas, collecting ideas and selecting them as easy. But how do you actually make it stick?

So how do you build a pilot and how does that actually come to fruition? Because it's, yeah, you said four to eight weeks. Do organizations actually stick with this process, like continuously evolve, deploy, pilot, and have a new phase? How does that work with the customers you've had longer term?

Yeah, answer everybody love to hate. It depends. The two categories would be like you have one side, which is true, quote unquote, innovation. If you look at this as horizons, right?

Like, innovation, they're trying to do Horizon 2, everybody tries to do Horizon 3. Realistically, it's they're in Horizon 1 or 2-ish, but they're trying to build new products and services that are customer facing. They'll normally do one campaign a year, maybe two when they get going. And the main driver of success from that perspective is that there's a PMO or an existing function in the organization that the ideas have an outlet to. At the end.

So like from our customer that's been like, customer in manufacturing, about 100 years old at this point, they ran like the full gamut of the program. So the front end process plus that accelerator program. They pitched to the CEO and senior leadership at the end. Anything approved got put into their product portfolio and was on the roadmap. If it was approved by the CEO within the next 12 months, it's going to get picked up.

So that's what we found. If you think that implementing a tool to be innovative and like creating the role is going to help. It can create buzz, right? And one time out of 10 it works, but really you need to have some existing infrastructure in the organization, like a project management organization, even if they don't have the training. And or a product portfolio management part of the organization that these things can hook into at the back. The secondary piece for continuous improvement, those are ran normally like quarterly or Always on is what we call it.

So those are run throughout the year. There already is that infrastructure that exists automatically. From creating an improvement culture.

So those are normally much easier to launch. And like, go by themselves once you get them up and running from the innovation side as long as we have the outlet at the end we have I mean we have customers that have been with us for seven okay.

So then I like your example of a manufacturing company. I saw on your website, you have healthcare companies. They're not a product company.

I mean, they... Serve as the people that need care. How does it work for them? What kind of improvements do they look for? What kind of innovations do they look for?

So... A lot of the time it's around improving patient experience.

At the end of the day, not-for-profits are not-for-profits, but there are drivers. There's drivers that are similar to profit motives from like reducing length of stay to reducing like error rate or reducing like a misdiagnosis as an example.

So like there's still KPIs that they want to measure that are going to tie to like what's called HCAP scores for anybody in the healthcare industry. And so what we do is a lot of campaigns around those things that actually drive Medicare reimbursement rates. While improving patient experience and or their employee experience is a natural benefit of using a system.

Okay, nice. So from your perspective, right, our audience is mostly tech leaders, What kind of roles should they play or do you expect them to play in the innovation culture in a company?

Great question. We normally, like in a large company, there's always a product owner from the IT organization, right? And a lot of the time they just play like a supporting role for getting us through the compliance side of things.

And then managing the relationship for renewals. Right. But in a technology driven organization, the biggest and In the 21st century, right, where we live today, 90% of the ideas are going to some in some ancillary way, touch technology. The number one bottleneck long-term of these programs in terms of increasing the throughput and ROI of these programs is when it touches IT.

So all these ideas touch IT in some way, shape or form. IT is roadmaps if you're doing a waterfall approach versus like even if you're doing agile, honestly. The problem is you hit a huge bottleneck when things get passed to the IT organization. And if it doesn't come on high from the CEO or senior leadership that these things need to happen, it gets put onto a roadmap that's already two miles long. Right. And so, What we found works best is, A, there has to be agile. Always has to be senior leadership support. You can do it under waterfall if it's pushed by senior leadership, but really getting to an agile framework even when you have an agile framework, a big piece of the issue is once that's large organization, if you have 100, 150 people in that agile organization, it still falls into waterfall at the end of the day. We try doing agile. We're a team of like 20, we still run into the waterfall issue at the end of the day, right? And so, Looking at the return on investment, and starting to do that analysis on a recurring basis in like quarterlies. We found I guess we've had to start to do a lot more consulting. On like how to increase the throughput of ideas coming through the system.

So we've started touching a lot more in the change management side of the companies that we work with. And that's been something where you start to look at like value to effort or just doing like an ice score. Where you're doing your like quarterly touch bases as like a larger scrum team. We found to be super helpful. Does that answer your question?

I think so. So it's really... I'm trying to summarize that for myself.

So you basically consult with them to make sure that the right value versus effort is measured and that they focus on the right things and bring those into their processes. Instead of just the long, very long two mile roadmap that they already have anyway.

Yes, that's the biggest way they can help is basically trying to give some space or allocating or budgeting some like a small amount of time if you're running these programs in order to get some things through. That are coming from the front lines. Longer term, it's like, hey, When we're doing these checkpoints, if you're an agile team, on the value to effort for things that you might not have planned for, which is the point of Agile, right? Agile. We found in practice a lot of the time it's not, but like having a space where the new things that are coming in are evaluated to the current priorities.

Now, I need anything to challenge that you have. And I wonder how you think about it. And I think you maybe answered it already is a lot of these corporates and technology organizations that I see that work with annual budgets.

So budget gets set in September, October, and that's basically the budget that they have until next Christmas, what they have to do with it. Usually that's already planned to 110, 120%.

So there's no space to do anything else, right? And I'm being optimistic. It could be 150%, but there's always way more work than there is budget. How do you change that for them or with them?

So how we've approached it, because at the end of the day, right, from our business, we're selling software. So like, I'm going to give something that can actually be a value add. From a CTO perspective. The simplest way is just once this program gets launched, to allocate budgeted time. And that's really easy to say, super difficult to do, I understand. But like giving a slot of time and having the expectation from leadership and like the buy-in from leadership at all, it all comes from a top-down perspective, which is out of all of our control. It makes it difficult. But having some budgeted time, even if it's like 10% budget or five, 3% budgeted time for year one, or ideas that are coming in.

So you have like a slot. With 150% time, not realistic, but that's the easiest way. The way that we do it, because we have no control over IT, right? From we're a SaaS vendor, right? Not scalable for us to do. We create enabling events up front where we'll engage.

Like if we go to a thousand person company, we'll engage like a 60, 65% of folks voluntarily. And that gets leadership to notice and gets leadership excited to Then on the back end, we already know that this is an issue. And so what we do is try to get more budgeted time or resources from all of the engagement that happens so we keep the buzz going. It's essentially the real answer of what we try to do because we can't control it is to actually get more budgeted time, which IT doesn't hate. Right. Obviously. Realistically, it's the slot. Longer term as you prove the ROI of the program from the idea.

Just... Reserving some time, some budget every year to work on innovation, things that only come in like midway through the year or somewhere else. Not it's not rocket science.

Rocket science, once again. Sorry, that's not a better answer. No.

But I mean, from my own experience as well, it's incredibly hard to do things like that because there's always more work than there is budget. Especially in IT.- Okay. Then, and going back to yourself, you've built this company for over a decade, I think so 12 years. You said that you've learned almost everything to do wrong, going from absolutely zero to 2 million. What were the biggest lessons and what did it teach you about like building, innovating and building a SaaS company in general?

Foof. Trying to apply this to the audience. Well, we started with a non-multi-tenant infrastructure for our minimum viable products that we ended up keeping for the first six years. I feel overhead of that was my God, it was terrible. Lots of long nights there. But that's really tactical feedback. That's the first thing that popped into my mind was not doing a multi-tenant infrastructure. I would say We even as a small team, and I mean, like I said, we're small relative to the audience probably, but I mean, we're 20 strong right now. And even at that team size, you start to run into the issues around like, We've implemented Agile. We're all trained in Agile.

At the end of the day, there's like when... Issues come up and you have fires that you have to fight, you always fall back to this like waterfall almost approach and hot fixes that you have to do all the time. It's really having some type of quarterly cadence where we all reflect together as a team. And in like a larger organization, it's in your pot, like the pods that you might set up. Right. For those teams to really reflect and try to make changes based upon what the front lines in each team is saying versus just the manager. It's, We always, every quarter we do it, we end up like... Getting more waterfall as issues come up and then we come back to the agile methodology and reprioritize things literally every single quarter. And we started doing that about two years ago now. And it's like, it cleared out 90% of the issues that we were having in terms of just things piling up, resulting in customer churn. Lower customer satisfaction, and us being able from a retention perspective from our people. Hope that's helpful. Okay.

So just regularly reviewing all the issues I like that you'd and then go to Waterfall and then go back to Agile. I like that approach as.

Well. Yeah, and not going through the motions of doing the review, but gently taking action because everybody does like these quarterlies, right? If you're a large team, You have all of your pods get together.

And then you're doing like a large review on like your overall roadmap quarterly. But like most of the time, it's like, from what we've seen, like I said, we work with over a thousand companies at this point. A lot of those reviews there's talk that happens and then the work when you go back to your nine to five back in your location goes back to what you were doing before versus like actively really trying to take action on what comes out of this.

Meeting. Nothing. Otherwise, nothing changes. You can do a review and either Maybe focuses too much on the details and not on the bigger picture. Yes. Or. You have a lot of learned lessons and nothing happens and everybody goes back to doing the exact same thing so you can discuss the same feedback in the review a quarter later.- Is that Yeah, no, and I think that makes sense.

Fair? That's very fair. Very fair.

I think you're a SaaS vendor. I think you've been building this for 10, 12 years. You're selling SaaS to enterprise companies.

So what is the biggest barriers that you find selling to enterprise companies or actually working with those kinds of businesses.

So one, it's the barriers to entry. Security is like paramount today, right? And so like, it's really interesting when we started, all you needed was a pen test. Now you need a tight two. Right. And so like as everybody is evolving, right. And security stances are evolving. I would say making sure that you're evolved, like, especially as now things are accelerating, the security stance has to remain paramount and like be the stance that everybody has. And that has to continuously be getting evolved and trying to get ahead of threat vectors that are going to come up. Right.

At the end of the day, though, a lot of the time, like we have our, we've got our type one. We're just, we've, are about to be issued are type two. Pass with flying colors, which is awesome. And the thing is that once you hand the type two over, you still have to fill out a 500 question assessment. Even though you have the type two and it's addressing all the questions in the assessment. I would say having some, you want to be able to cover your risks, but at the end of the day, it's, you're covering your wrists and then adding extra burden. This is from the vendor perspective, right? Which takes a lot longer. It can add three months onto the cycle to get started. For the client.

And then you lose your main point of contact and then you're paying for software that you don't use because we never got a lot. So it's like, really not Security mindset first, but not letting security get in the way for sake of the security when you've already reduced or eliminated a lot of the risks. At the expense of business value. Be my main piece of feedback.

So, and how do you convince, because the same is true when they run innovation, right? When you run innovation inside an organization or when they want to introduce your idea wake.

I mean, security reviews can take very long. How do you...

I mean even if all the risks are said sometimes security teams are quite rigid I'm not always pragmatic. How do you... Manage those discussions. And handle them.

I mean, you got to sock to... That's step one.

And then be GDPR compliant. I mean, depending on where you are in the world, make sure you have all your compliance certificates because compliance always gets involved too with enterprise, right? And just get things done as fast as possible when you receive them.

So we have like a dedicated person that just does at this point, like, We're growing at a clip right now. So we have something that's literally dedicated to doing security. That's like what they do. And we trained them up on it and did a ton of training. And literally like that's what they do. We're doing several of these a week. And yeah, I would say security sometimes, if you're like a company trying to get into enterprise, there's always going to be... Person might be off for a week or be sick and then that's going to push the review back by two weeks when it already takes two months.

So like this speed of turning stuff around once you receive it and having the resourcing internally. Once again, I feel like I'm not giving you a lot of stuff. This is simple stuff. But maybe hearing like the verification of it, if it's being thought through, would be helpful.

No, and it is really useful, right? Because I think a lot of smaller SaaS organizations would like to work with enterprises. Indeed, it is hard and things like this, ISO certification, SOC certification, GDPR maybe not so much, but all the questions that you get, I mean, I used to, I've been on the other side. I used to send out those questionnaires and we just had our standard security sheet attached to it, which was easy.

Yeah, 75, 100 questions about everything, right? That you could ask for. And that's just how enterprises work. And it's frustrating.

So I understand you have somebody dedicated in your team just to deal with the security aspects from your clients.-

Exactly. Yeah. No, I mean, and it's just understanding because every... From a security stance perspective, right? The team is reviewing on an annual basis, their overall security stance and process, right?

So it's understanding when you're doubling down, like, To be innovative, getting compliance to help accelerate things while keeping risk to a minimal level or an acceptable level. Depending upon the category of risk is like, your main goal is, right? It's well, Problem is that their main goal is to keep risk at the acceptable level. And so they're not thinking about the speed at which they're getting stuff through a lot of the time. And be, So it's literally trying to bring that element into things, which is going to once again need to come from leadership.

Because of retention. And like your main point of contact, we don't see it that much because we've gotten really good at it now. In the beginning, like five years ago, it happened all the time. Where we would get into security, it would literally take us four months, five months to get through contracting and security. Our main point of contact would get a new job and we'd have to start from square one and it would take us an additional six months to add business value.

It's taking you time to learn how to deal with enterprises and all those questionnaires and the RFP processes and actually make that smooth from your side.

Precisely. We weren't going to change the behemoths.

Yeah. All right.

I can imagine. I mean, if I see the process with some other larger software vendors, I mean, it's equally difficult. It's just a difficult process. I get it, but it's, yeah. For me personally, it drains energy sometimes as well, but I understand why it has to be done.

So, and then taking it one step further, and then we're going to end with the security, well, not just security, but you work with healthcare companies, which are even... More regulated than some of the regular corporates that you work with. Does that affect you at all? Does he need to do more?

It actually doesn't because we just the nature of our business, right? What we do is when you do that, when the risk profile for security is, Question one in all healthcare organizations is what are your categories of data? And so we make sure that we're not touching any PHI. Kind of acting controls on our end to make sure that we like, have checks for all of our form submissions that we're not getting any PII submitted and saved to the database. That was our workaround for it.

So we just, it's, It might be it might take a little bit longer. There might be additional questions right on the security form that we're filling out for the intake and health care versus non health care. But because we didn't go into the PHI category. It makes everything it's, marginal in terms of the increased.

Nice. Now that makes sense. I was figuring that you wouldn't store any PII because that makes your life, especially in healthcare so much more difficult. If we then go to the hype of the moment, right, AI, it's on the one hand, it's really useful and idea generating. It's reshaping how that's done, how it's evaluated. How do you see AI actually changing innovation programs over the next couple of years?

So the, I mean, it's going to change everything everywhere, right? As much as And like I do technology for a living and do ideation for a living, right? The jury's out still on what impact it's going to have on like all the jobs, right? I think that right now it's overhyped. That being said, looking at what like Sora 2, and I can't tell whether a video is real or not anymore, it's accelerating quickly. Maybe the models of how they're measured aren't getting, I mean, it's like there's diminishing marginal return, but still the stuff that's coming out is crazy. In between versions for new products. How it's going to affect innovation, where we've seen it, like we're integrating it into like, if you look at our stack, what we do is we do upfront ideation, We do collaboration. We do evaluation, business case development, implementation, measuring impact, right? We literally have AI being integrated into that stack for every single step in that process in some way, shape or form. Where it is right now is augmentation of humans and helping humans come up with better ideas at the front end of the process. Helping automate some of the most time-consuming tasks. When you're trying to do a program like Ideawake where you're engaging thousand to 150,000 people. Where it's going to change all teams is in the initial minimum viable product development early stage. Testing to build out a plan to validate assumptions around the idea. That's like where the biggest gains for all innovation teams can be seen and we're seeing it. Right now, we're building a module specifically into Ideawake for that. Because of that.

So, Basically what took maybe three months before can be done in two weeks. With statistically significant data instead of just directional.

Cool. So across every single step, just making it supporting the humans in the process and just automating all the standard, easy to do work.

Yeah, so it's the most time-consuming, tedious work is where we start. Yeah.

Yeah. But Yeah. It's going to keep expanding.

Makes sense. And then... From your perspective and that whole end-to-end process, I mean, a lot of organizations, the whole technology sector is moving faster. And I think with AI in the industry, I think innovation and businesses is going faster and probably needs to go faster and organizations are feeling a lot of pressure to go faster and to innovate more.

So what are some of the things that you're looking at or that you're testing that could... Change how large organizations innovate or speed it up?

So, I mean, the AI piece kind of what I highlighted for like accelerating the actual build out of a business case behind an idea and it actually being pretty accurate based on the like the RAG training data. It's not where we're using Microsoft OpenAI. Right so it's like we're using a generic large language model but you can add like your own instructions on top of that, just like with any agent.

So that piece is like the lowest hanging fruit, I would say. In terms of like, To go back to the previous thing that you said, The number one thing. For accelerating innovation inside of companies. Because a lot of it still touches software and it's still, I think, going to continue to do that for the long term. Is going through that vendor management process and figuring out optimizations that you can make there. Specifically the metrics, like, security having a baseline that it always needs to maintain because that's number one is the security stance, but having some metrics where you are thinking about at least the acceleration and not duplicating work for the.

Back end. So accelerating all procurements, onboarding process so you can actually just shorten your projects or onboarding new vendors and work with more vendors maybe because you can just get started much quicker, not having to wait three to six months. Proces.

Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.

So actually almost the procurement process is holding a lot of businesses back. Especially the.

Outside end. So like for our programs, you have inside out.

So employees coming up with the ideas and those bubbling up and then getting, you know, either internal processes optimized or like going to customers. The other thing, though, it's really common, even when employees come up with the ideas, there's a solution to solve the problem externally. And so like the main thing is once you run the program and you want to bring something in. It all touches that.

Like, if you think about it like a bubble, right? Making that bubble more malleable where you still are not letting anything in, but making it a lot more resilient in terms of how quickly it can do low risk things. Peace.

So how quickly you can run a low risk pilot with an external tool without having to go through the entire three to six month procurement onboarding security review vendor management process.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that really speeds up a pilot. I understand. Okay for the technology leaders that are working in innovation or in organizations that may be don't have innovation, yet or that don't have a tool like idea wake what's your advice to them? How can they get started, promoted? Because innovation often just is done within technology and it's something that really needs to happen in an organization. Why did you say?

So what's your advice to those technology leaders who really think organization should become a more integral part of their business.

So, one more answer. That everybody loves to hate is looking at where your organization, like it's going to depend upon the, Organizational makeup. If you have other leaders that are near, like close to you where you can go cross-functional right away.

Cause we've had, we've seen, like I said, we've done this over a thousand times now. So like we've seen it done both ways successfully. If the organization, like specifically the CEO, and or the other leaders you can't bring along quickly, you're going to be spinning your wheels for 12 to 18, 24 months, just trying to bring folks on board and building the business case. If you are like a VP, CTO inside the organization of the authority to do it, Where you start is with yourself and trying to build some capacity and showing ROI.

And then pitching that as a business case and running a pilot internally. That would be my advice. Take the things that are in your control, start innovating there and create a story. With an ROI that you can then copy and paste and demonstrate other places.

Just start small on your own and don't spend a year or two years trying to convince your board senior leadership that it might be a good idea. Okay. Lead by example, not by telling them. Okay?

And then finally, and I think you said this, right? You started working with innovation or with somebody and then four or five months on, they would start to get a new job. And well, basically your efforts would have been lost. Innovation culture is something that really needs to be sustainable, right? It's something that should become an integral part of a company. How do you build that in, not just from the start, but how do you build it in so that even when reorganizations happen or market swings happen, the entire organization stays focused on innovation? What do you do?

So not to repeat myself, but it's like folks think that innovation is this nebulous black box, right? At the end of the day, organizations will implement a 365 feedback program or they'll implement like a new sales tool, right. In order to measure, like the process of completing employee reviews, Right. If you don't complete your employee review, you get like a strike. Might be called something different in different companies, but it's something that's against you. That for some reason, people think that innovation needs to be this natural thing that bubbles up. It's the same thing as any other initiative that you implement anywhere. Side of a company. If you have one person driving it versus it being in your actual like integrated review process. It's going to be, you're going to incur, you are going to significantly increase the probability that it's going to die at some point, whether it's because of one person leaving the organization. And or going through some type of economic downturn. Or are you not hitting your quarterly numbers if you're a publicly traded company? Really, it's all about The culture itself is just the instilled collective values that the organization shares. Across departments and teams. The easiest way to connect those, like the connect issue of that is quarterly annual or.

Yeah. So just make an, Make it an integral part of every person's job or role to have a little bit of innovation as part of their.

Role. Yes.

I mean, just if it's a goal from on high from leadership, Just like you would do any other initiative, how you're going to measure a frontline team member is going to be on like number of ideas that they share. You manage their direct... You measure their direct manager on the number of employees shared by their direct reports. You manage a director on the number of ideas reviewed and approved and implemented. You measure a VP. It's just like any other program. It's just that people don't see it that way because innovation, like once again, seems like this black box, nebulous.

Thing. As you do somewhere on the side or as a one person team somewhere doing that and that's not part of my job. Hey, Coby. That was all of my questions. It's been incredibly exciting. Thank you. For people that want to learn more about Ideawake, what's the best way to engage with you or find you?

Yeah, you can just go to our website. It's ideawake.com. I guess it's spelled right behind me so you can see that. And you can book a demo, free trial, or just contact us.

Yeah, I will make sure that we put it in the show notes as well so you can read it down there as well. Coby, thank you very much.

Of course. Thank you, Mark.