Episode 14: Challenges bring to light what innovation is important, with Vlora Muslimi, TD Bank

The most powerful source of innovation in an organization is not the strategy, the technology, or the dedicated innovation team. It is the hidden innovator inside every employee. The agent in the contact center watching the same friction repeat. The cashier at the branch trying to ease the crowd. The new hire who spots a broken onboarding process before anyone else does.In this episode of the Activate Innovation Lounge, Iliriana Kaçaniku sits down with Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager of the ID8 program and colleague innovation at TD Bank, to understand what it really takes to awaken that hidden innovator. Vlora has led an enterprise program across a workforce of over 100,000 people, collected more than 100,000 ideas, and watched over 10,000 of them come to life. Last December, TD lit Toronto's Union Station with 10,000 individual lights, one for every employee idea brought to life, each one activated by human movement.Vlora shares how ID8 began as informal idea-sharing, evolved into challenge-based innovation, and why the promise of implementation is the engine that keeps it all running. If you lead innovation, with or without the title, this conversation is a blueprint.What You Will LearnHow ID8 started organically from employees fixing things "side of the desk," and what made leadership formalize itWhy the people closest to the friction are the best source of problems worth solvingThe shift from an open idea box to challenge-based innovation, and what triggered it after the pandemicWhy the promise of implementation has to be real, or participation diesThe difference between "small i" incremental ideas and "big I" ideas, and why their paths divergeWhy the internal crowd often beats an external one, thanks to tacit knowledgeWhy the best solution to a problem frequently comes from outside the team that owns itThe critical role of leadership, and why it must cascade through every layerHow AI can assist the innovation process without replacing human creativity