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Kaihan Krippendorff: “Idea Marketplace” Can Boost Innovation

Thought Leader: Kaihan Krippendorff
September 29, 2025
Source: Harvard Business Review
Written by: Kaihan Krippendorff, George S. Day and Jayshree Seth

Even as the pressure to innovate grows, many companies are finding it harder and more expensive to bring new ideas to life. This slowdown is often attributed to rising R&D costs, longer development timelines, and market uncertainty. But our research shows something different: Many organizations already have the ideas they need. The real challenge is that the systems for surfacing and connecting those ideas—what we call “idea marketplaces”—aren’t working as they should.

We first uncovered this issue in our eight-year study on intrapreneurship. We spoke with over 150 internal innovators—employees who had launched or driven new products, services, or ventures within their organizations—and about 100 strategy leaders across industries. We found that, even when employees had innovative solutions to business problems, several barriers kept senior decision-makers from noticing them.

This led us to ask harder questions: If companies say they want innovation, why do they make it so difficult for employees with promising ideas to move forward? Are these barriers simply the result of inattentive leaders, or are they symptoms of deeper, systemic inefficiencies that many firms have grown to accept as normal?

What We Learned

To find answers, we launched a new study focused on the systems organizations use to share and act on ideas. We conducted open-ended interviews with 25 chief innovation officers (CIOs) at large, multinational enterprises with intricate structures and decision-making processes. These included Microsoft, LEGO, Coca-Cola, and Cisco, as well as institutions like the World Health Organization and the Red Cross. We also spoke to and surveyed 35 leaders at corporate venture capital programs.

We asked questions like:

Leaders overwhelmingly agreed that when their teams are given the bandwidth to explore a challenge internally, they find the answer already exists about 70% of the time—lodged in the code of an overworked engineer, the half-formed thoughts of a call center rep, or a database of unused technologies. Despite this, they estimated that only around 10% of the ideas employees share are formally reviewed.

Our findings led us to adopt the metaphor of an “idea marketplace.” We define an idea marketplace as the formal and informal systems inside organizations that should match people who spot emerging needs with those who may have answers. In theory, such a system should accelerate innovation. In practice, leaders told us, it’s clunky or nonexistent.

A supplementary survey we conducted with 250 employees across professions reinforced this point. Respondents said they generate about 75 ideas per year on average but share less than 30% of them, with 70% citing company culture as the main deterrent.

What’s at Stake

Firms that lack a robust and efficient idea marketplace put themselves at a clear disadvantage. Without an organized way to surface needs and connect them with potential solutions, many organizations end up replicating the innovations of more successful rivals or wasting money reinventing the wheel—patterns that can slow growth and erode financial performance.

To demonstrate just how costly this can be, imagine a $1 billion company with roughly 5,000 employees. Each employee generates about 75 ideas a year, but if only 30% are shared and leaders act on just 10%, most of that creative potential is lost. If instead employees shared half their ideas and leaders acted on 20%—even with only a 15% success rate and $25,000–$50,000 in value per successful idea—the company could capture an additional $70–$140 million annually. Failing to improve idea sharing and follow-through means leaving tens of millions of dollars on the table every year.

The Solution

To understand and address the barriers that both leaders and employees described, we broadened our inquiry. With the 25 CIOs, we not only confirmed the scale of the challenge but also asked about the specific efforts their companies were undertaking to address it.

We also spoke with 100 chief strategy officers (CSOs)—members of our community at Outthink Networks who lead strategy and often also innovation—inside large enterprises across a range of industries. We wanted to pressure-test our initial findings and learn what, if any, practices their companies are using to help employees share needs and solutions internally. In these conversations we asked, “Do our findings make sense? Does this fit your experience? What are we missing?”

During these discussions, a consistent set of obstacles to idea-sharing emerged: structural barriers like silos and red tape, limited capacity to review and act on ideas, weak leadership commitment to follow through on innovation, and a lack of long-term incentives for employees to keep contributing their ideas.

When we asked CIOs and CSOs how to address these issues, most had similar recommendations. They agreed that an effective idea marketplace should:

When we asked how to put this kind of marketplace into practice, we heard three common approaches: improving processes, reworking organizational structure, and building a more supportive culture.

Let’s look at each.

1. Improving the innovation process

Earlier we noted that structural obstacles such as silos and red tape make it hard for ideas to move forward. This can look like slow approval chains, duplicated work across departments, or unclear ownership of new initiatives. The majority of leaders told us their first step is to counter those obstacles with a well-defined process—one that helps employees surface needs, connect them with potential solutions, and guide the strongest ideas toward investment.

Many organizations combine tools like idea campaigns (company-wide calls for new ideas), stage-gates (step-by-step checkpoints to vet ideas), and review panels (cross-functional teams that evaluate proposals) into customized innovation programs.

What this looks like in practice: The CIO of a large, nearly 200-year-old European semi-government financial organization told us they follow a multi-step process that both builds employees’ innovation skills and moves the most promising ideas forward. Here’s how it works:

To start, the innovation and learning teams jointly conduct an organization-wide assessment of each employee’s digital literacy and readiness for change. They then offer innovation training to a select group with high scores. During the training, the innovation team narrows the group even further, selecting top performers to be internal “innovation evangelists”—employees tasked with collecting and prioritizing needs in each business unit.

Next, these evangelists bring their strongest ideas to a Shark Tank–style pitch session, where senior leaders and subject-matter experts challenge proposals, provide feedback, and decide which ideas merit deeper investment.

After that vetting, the remaining ideas are sorted into three groups:

This sequence—from assessment and training to pitch sessions and final matching—makes it easier to move high-potential ideas toward action. 

2. Reworking the organizational structure

Many companies struggle with a limited capacity to review and act on ideas. A strong idea marketplace addresses this by streamlining how ideas move across teams and reach decision-makers, instead of getting stuck in layers of approval.

Some organizations tackle this by flattening their structure and decentralizing decision-making. Others create dedicated pathways for exploring new opportunities alongside their core business—like setting up advisory boards to surface needs and then deciding whether to build solutions internally, buy them through acquisitions, or partner with outside firms.

Both approaches expand the organization’s ability to evaluate ideas and advance the most promising ones without the barrier of long approval chains.

What this looks like in practice: Leaders at Bayer, a global life-science company based in Germany, are rolling out what they call a “Dynamic Shared Ownership (DSO)” model. It’s meant to reduce middle management, organize employees into small autonomous teams, and give those teams greater freedom to act. Because DSO teams are closer to customers, data, and real-world challenges—and don’t need to run ideas up a long chain of command—they can act more autonomously, making cross-functional collaboration faster and easier.

Their effort draws inspiration from the Chinese conglomerate Haier, which treats employees as intrapreneurs and empowers small, independent teams to pursue opportunities. This kind of structural change can spark more entrepreneurial behavior and speed up innovation—but it’s also complex and requires sustained effort. Such change requires redesigning organizational structures and practices like performance management, incentives, decision rights, strategic planning, and resource allocation, among others.

3. Developing a more supportive culture 

Too often, innovation efforts fade because leaders fail to sustain them, and employees lack ongoing incentives to share and develop ideas. A strong idea marketplace helps overcome these obstacles by weaving innovation into daily work and rewarding employees for contributing and acting on ideas over time.

In fact, this approach is popular among many of the larger corporations we spoke with, including Amazon, Microsoft, and 3M.

What this looks like in practice: At 3M, the U.S. science and manufacturing company behind Post-it Notes and Scotch tape—where one of us (Jayshree) works—a strong innovation culture helps employees link customer insights with their own technical expertise. Employees are encouraged to spend 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing without needing formal approval.

The company also creates regular opportunities for “uncommon connections.” For instance, the 3M Technical Forum brings R&D employees together to share breakthroughs, discuss commercialization challenges, and spot ideas that could scale across units. This culture of openness and cross-team learning makes it easier to find and combine existing solutions, instead of reinventing the wheel or insisting on “building our own.”

Together, these practices create a culture where ideas flow freely and promising solutions are more likely to be developed and adopted.

. . .

All organizations want to discover the next big idea that will outsmart the competition and bring them both prestige and profitability. But what our research has shown is that often these ideas—or the germ of them—already exist within the depths of your own ecosystems. Solving this inefficiency can transform hidden insights into competitive advantage and unlock billions in untapped value. Gain inspiration from the practices and challenges outlined here to strengthen your own idea marketplace and turn untapped insights into a lasting competitive edge.

 

Dr. Kaihan Krippendorff is a Top 20 ranked global thinker, bestselling author, podcast host, and CEO whose work centers on strategic innovation and organizational transformation. Known for turning complex ideas into clear, practical insights, he helps leaders and teams think differently and execute bold strategies. Kaihan brings a rare combination of research, credibility, and real-world experience that makes him a powerful and engaging voice for any audience. Bring him to your next speaking event with WWSG. Contact us today.

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