9 Hand Picked Innovation Conferences You Can Still Catch in 2025

Still looking to learn and grow on your innovation and improvement journey in 2025? Although we’re already blasting off into Q2, here are 9 handpicked innovation conferences still happening in 2025 to help you and your team more effectively harness employee creativity and build more robust internal innovation ecosystems. 2025 Innovators Summit (5/2025, Chicago) Unlock practical tools to scale innovation with a focus on sustainability, future tech, and developing top

The most common reason that companies we talk to don’t move forward with an employee ideas program is centered around “we have other critical projects and priorities” to implement over the next 6 – 12 months.  What this really means 90% of the time is that leadership perceives the ROI of these other projects and initiatives to be higher than implementing an employee ideas program. Today, we’re sharing several heavy-hitting

One of the most common issues that comes from running Hackathons, Innovation Challenges, or crowdsourcing ideas is that there are more ideas that potentially have a positive ROI than you can possibly pursue. But what if you could increase your organization’s capacity to validate and test new ideas and ultimately better prioritize the ones with the most promise? Meet Adobe’s Kickbox Program – An initiative that was designed to democratize

Google is often synonymous with innovation in people’s minds. Over the last 20+ years, they have created some of the most user-friendly, dominating products on the market. As of December 2024, its parent company Alphabet holds the title as the 5th largest company measured by market capitalization on the planet. But, did you know that many of Google’s most successful products that drove its meteoric rise came from an internal

ROI is how you justify your programs existence, yet only 39% of organizations actually track their programs impact.

What is LEAPP at the University of Wisconsin Stout? The University of Wisconsin Stout (UW-Stout), Wisconsin’s Polytechnic University, is a university within the Universities of Wisconsin located in western Wisconsin. The Leading Educational Advancement through Polytechnic Pathways (LEAPP) program is a systematic approach to innovation that focuses on collection, analysis, and implementation of creative, innovative ideas for organizational transformation. Why is Innovation Important to UW-Stout? UW-Stout is focused on the

Toyota is the poster child for employee idea programs, you could say they were one of the main players who took the trend mainstream all the way back in the 1950’s as part of the “Kaizen” movement.  Their employee suggestion program, known as the “Creative Idea Suggestion System,” has been effective in generating significant annual savings for the company, and the value of ideas shared has accumulated into the billions

Since an employee ideas program is a large scale initiative that potentially involves every member of your organization, there are many senior stakeholders that you need to get and maintain buy-in from. This can be great, but oftentimes needing to incorporate feedback from so many different people causes unintended consequences that set your program up for failure in the long-term. Here are the six most common mistakes we see organizations

In today’s dynamic business environment, companies are increasingly recognizing the value of tapping into the collective intelligence of their workforce to drive innovation and continuous improvement. However, without the right tools and processes in place, harnessing employee ideas can be a daunting task. Enter idea management software – a powerful solution that empowers organizations to unleash the full potential of their workforce. Let’s explore how idea management software can revolutionize

At Ideawake, one of the most common questions we get from customers and leads is whether to include incentives for participation in their employee idea programs.  Although our response is always a resounding “yes,” from a best practice perspective, only ~50% of the organizations we work with elect to include incentives. This is for a variety of reasons, but they normally fall into one of three categories:  Although these are