There is a dangerous myth in business that too many leaders still cling to.
It is the myth that the best ideas rise from the top.
That innovation is something reserved for executives in boardrooms, product teams in strategy sessions, or the loudest voices in the room with the biggest budgets attached to them. That if a company wants to become more innovative, it needs to hire a genius, buy a shiny new platform, or task a special committee with dreaming up the future.
But that is not how real innovation usually works.
Real innovation often starts much lower down the org chart.
It starts with the person closest to the customer.
The person closest to the process.
The person closest to the inefficiency.
The person who loses an hour a day because something simple is broken.
The person who sees what leaders no longer see because they are too far from the work.
That is what made my conversation with Coby Skonord so compelling. Coby is the founder and CEO of IdeaWake, a platform that helps corporate innovation, improvement, and HR teams turn employee ideas into measurable results. He left a Big Four job on day one to build the company. Since then, he has helped brands like Kraft Heinz, SiriusXM, and U.S. Bank grow revenue, cut costs, and improve efficiency. He has raised more than $3.7 million and scaled the business to $2 million in annual recurring revenue. More importantly, he is helping organizations rethink what bottom-up innovation actually looks like in practice.
And business executives should be paying attention.
Because if you are serious about growth, efficiency, culture, retention, and the future of leadership inside your organization, then you need to care deeply about where ideas come from and what happens to them once they surface.
Innovation Is Not Just About Big, Flashy Disruption
One of the reasons I appreciated this conversation so much is that Coby grounded innovation in reality rather than hype.
We talk about innovation as if it always has to mean radical technology, scientific breakthrough, or dramatic market disruption. And yes, those things matter. But innovation is not exclusively about moonshots. It is not only about the next big platform or the next category-defining product.
Sometimes innovation is much smaller.
Sometimes it is an employee saving one hour a day.
That may not sound glamorous. But if a thousand people each save an hour a day, that is a thousand hours of recovered capacity every single day. That is not a minor improvement. That is a material shift in operating efficiency.
This is one of the most important mindset changes for executives.
If you only define innovation as the big disruptive breakthrough, you miss the incredible value hidden in operational improvement. And when those smaller improvements are systematically surfaced, evaluated, and implemented, they do more than save time or money. They build the muscle of innovation across the organization.
That is where the bigger transformations eventually come from.
The Case for Bottom-Up Innovation
At the heart of IdeaWake is a very practical belief: the people inside your organization already hold more valuable ideas than you are currently capturing.
Some of those ideas may be transformational.
Some may be incremental.
Some may improve customer experience.
Some may reduce waste.
Some may boost retention, engagement, or employee well-being.
But many of them would never surface without an intentional system to bring them forward.
That matters more now than ever.
AI is changing how work gets done, but it is not eliminating the importance of humans in the workforce. If anything, the rise of automation makes uniquely human insight even more valuable. Observation, judgment, creativity, contextual awareness, lived experience, and the ability to connect dots across a messy operating environment remain essential business assets.
And those assets do not only live at the top.
Coby’s work centers on helping companies tap into the people they would otherwise never hear from. The frontline employee. The quiet problem-solver. The person who sees the recurring frustration that no dashboard captures cleanly. The person with an idea that could either positively disrupt the business or simply make tomorrow run better than today.
Both matter.
That is the genius of bottom-up innovation when it is done well.
Crawl, Walk, Run Is More Than a Framework. It Is a Discipline.
I smiled when Coby said IdeaWake literally uses a crawl, walk, run framework because it aligns perfectly with something I say often: sustainable transformation rarely happens in giant leaps. It builds through momentum.
And that is exactly how their process works.
Rather than launching some vague open-ended invitation for ideas and hoping something useful appears, IdeaWake structures innovation through time-based campaigns they call innovation challenges. Think of them as internal marketing campaigns with a business objective attached. The company identifies a specific topic related to an organizational goal—something with real dollars, operational importance, or strategic significance behind it—and then opens a focused call for ideas.
That focus is critical.
Because unstructured ideation often devolves into noise. Great companies do not need more suggestion boxes filled with disconnected complaints, random hopes, or abstract wish lists. They need ideas tied to real business priorities.
So employees submit ideas around a defined challenge. Others in the organization can comment, build on those ideas, or join forces around them. Different types of voting help surface what has traction. Subject matter experts evaluate shortlisted ideas. Then the business can manage the full lifecycle, from idea to implementation to measurable financial impact.
This is important because the value of innovation is not the idea alone.
The value is in the system that takes the idea somewhere.
Getting Buy-In: Why the Middle Often Resists More Than the Top
One of the more interesting insights Coby shared was about where buy-in tends to be easiest and where it tends to get stuck.
Executives often assume senior leadership will be the hardest sell. But in Coby’s experience, many senior leaders—especially CEOs and executive vice presidents—intuitively understand the logic of bottom-up innovation. They know they are seeing the business through reports, summaries, and filtered information. They know they are not on the front lines every day. So the idea that hidden value and untapped insight exist lower in the organization often makes immediate sense to them.
Where friction shows up more often is in middle management.
That is fascinating and not remotely surprising.
Middle managers are often the people asked to absorb change, facilitate new initiatives, protect current operations, hit quarterly goals, manage teams, and somehow create room for something new without losing traction on what already exists. If innovation is positioned as extra work with unclear upside, resistance is almost guaranteed.
That is why tone at the top matters.
Senior leadership has to make the case clearly. They have to connect innovation to what the organization already says it values. Coby noted two particularly effective entry points:
- reducing operating expenses
- improving employee retention
That is smart.
If a company can cut costs through employee-led process improvements, leaders pay attention. If a company can improve retention by making employees feel heard, empowered, and engaged, leaders pay attention. And when both happen at once, the business case becomes hard to ignore.
The Operational ROI of Employee Ideas Is Bigger Than Most Leaders Realize
Coby shared a story about one of IdeaWake’s earlier customers that perfectly illustrates the difference between having an idea process and having a functioning innovation engine.
This company had an offline suggestion system using physical cards. Participation was decent, around 20 to 22 percent, but the volume and frequency of ideas were limited. After digitizing the process with IdeaWake, six months later they had increased active monthly employee participation to 78 percent.
That is a cultural shift.
But it was not only about participation. The company also generated an additional $1.4 million in savings, representing about 2 percent of the operating unit’s bottom line.
Let’s pause there.
That is not a soft metric.
That is not “employee satisfaction theater.”
That is measurable financial value created by a more effective idea system.
And that is exactly where many executives need to update their assumptions. Employee engagement and operational performance are not separate conversations. They reinforce each other. When people feel their ideas matter, they engage differently. When engagement turns into implemented improvement, the business performs differently.
That is the double win.
Innovation Is a Muscle, Not a One-Time Initiative
Coby said something that every executive should internalize: innovation is a muscle.
It is not a one-time launch. It is not a quarterly campaign you run because the CEO gave a speech about being more creative. It is not a poster on the wall or a hackathon that produces energy for 48 hours and then vanishes into the void.
It is a practice.
And like any practice, it requires repetition, structure, reinforcement, and visible outcomes.
This is why so many companies fail when they try to jump straight to the big disruptive idea. They want a new product, a breakthrough offering, or a business model reinvention, but they have not built the muscle to support that kind of effort. Employees are still being measured on quarterly or annual goals that do not reward experimentation, collaboration, or contribution to innovation. Middle managers are still constrained by incentives that prioritize predictability over exploration. The CEO says they want transformation, but the operating system still punishes deviation from the usual path.
So the big initiative falls flat.
Not because the idea was wrong.
Because the organization was unprepared.
That is why crawl, walk, and run matter.
Start with operational improvements.
Get some wins.
Build buzz.
Show ROI.
Teach the organization that ideas can move, not just accumulate.
Then expand into bigger, more disruptive territory.
That is how you create momentum that sticks.
A Story of Disruptive Innovation Before the Market Needed It
For all the importance of small wins, there are also moments when bottom-up innovation creates something much bigger.
Coby shared an example from OSF Healthcare, a rural Catholic health system in Peoria, Illinois. In 2019, before COVID, they launched a campaign around aging in place—already an important trend in healthcare. One of the ideas that emerged was essentially a hospital-at-home model before hospital-at-home became a mainstream topic.
That timing mattered enormously.
When COVID hit, healthcare systems everywhere were scrambling. Many organizations were still operating from a care model built around getting patients into physical facilities because so much of their infrastructure and economics depended on those buildings. But OSF had already begun building the infrastructure, resourcing, and business model for care delivered in the home.
So when the world changed, they were ahead.
That is a powerful example of what happens when organizations create systems for capturing and acting on ideas before a crisis forces urgency. They are not only more innovative. They are more resilient.
Executives should take note of that. Bottom-up innovation is not just about efficiency. It is also about strategic adaptability.
The Founder Story: A Reformed Accountant and a Necessary Pivot
Coby’s entrepreneurial journey is its own lesson in bottom-up listening.
He describes himself as a reformed accountant. His background was in accounting and finance. He had no experience building software. At 23, he leaped into entrepreneurship, partly because, as he put it, he did not yet know how hard it would be.
That honesty is refreshing.
Many founders make their boldest decisions before they fully understand the difficulty in front of them. Sometimes that naivety is not a liability. Sometimes it is the reason they begin at all.
But perhaps the most important moment in Coby’s journey was not the leap out of a Big Four career. It was the pivot that followed.
The first version of the company was completely different. It was built to help anyone anywhere in the world develop their idea using the wisdom of crowds and crowdsourced building. Over two years, they helped bring roughly 500 products to life across industries ranging from textiles to manufacturing to software.
The problem?
Entrepreneurs often had ideas, but not money.
That is a terrible foundation for a business model.
Then, a manufacturing company approached Coby after he spoke at a local event and asked if the same approach could be used inside their organization for employee ideas. His first answer was no. It was not what they did. It was not the plan.
Thankfully, his co-founders pushed him to reconsider.
That pivot changed everything.
And it is such a useful reminder for executives: sometimes the market sees your most valuable application before you do. The ability to hear it, even when it contradicts your original vision, is often the difference between a good idea and a real business.
The Hard Lesson of COVID and the Strength of Diversification
Like many businesses, IdeaWake was hit hard by COVID. At the time, over half of the company’s revenue came from healthcare, where deal sizes were larger and momentum was strong. They had five health systems in late-stage contracting that would have more than doubled the company’s monthly recurring revenue.
Then March 2020 happened.
All five deals disappeared.
Anyone who has sold into healthcare knows how painful that is. Long cycles. Deep effort. Security reviews. Contracting hurdles. Stakeholder alignment. To lose not just one but five deals at once after all that work is brutal.
It took more than two years to recover the lost ground.
But in fighting through that pain, the company matured. It diversified. Today, IdeaWake operates across 18 different verticals and no single customer represents more than 3 percent of revenue.
That is real resilience.
And it is a classic entrepreneurial lesson: sometimes the disruption that nearly breaks your business is the same disruption that forces it to become stronger, more balanced, and more durable.
What Business Executives Should Learn from Coby Skonord’s Journey
Coby Skonord’s journey offers a sharp, timely lesson for business leaders.
The best ideas in your company are probably not all sitting in the executive suite.
They are distributed throughout the organization, often hidden in plain sight among people who understand the work, the process, the customer, and the friction better than leadership can from a distance. If you do not have a structured way to surface those ideas, develop them, evaluate them, and implement them, then you are leaving value untouched every single day.
More than that, you are missing an opportunity to build your next generation of leaders.
Because bottom-up innovation is not only about ideas, it is about ownership. It is about engagement. It is about teaching people that they can improve the business they are part of. It is about creating a culture where better is everyone’s job, not just senior leadership’s aspiration.
For executives, the lessons are clear:
- innovation and improvement are not separate agendas
- small wins build the muscle for a bigger transformation
- middle-management buy-in requires thoughtful change design
- employee engagement becomes far more powerful when it is tied to visible outcomes
- the organizations most ready for disruption are often the ones that were already listening before they had to
That is what IdeaWake helps companies do.
Not just collect ideas.
Use them.
Measure them.
Build culture through them.
And create meaningful business value because of them.
That is not a suggestion box.
That is a strategic advantage.
Listen to the full episode on C-Suite Radio: Disrupt & Innovate | C-Suite Network
Watch the episode: DI 164 Engaging Employees for Innovation Success
Check our website: LcubedConsulting.com
This article was drafted with the assistance of an AI writing assistant (Abacus.AI’s ChatLLM Teams) and edited by Lisa L. Levy for accuracy, tone, and final content.
