2026 will be a year in which you can no longer plod along quietly. International tensions continue to fester, protectionism is rampant, and consumers are taking a wait-and-see approach. What seemed 'certain' yesterday appears to be temporary today. At the same time, the European economy is struggling in many sectors: energy costs, investment pressure, talent shortages, regulations, external competition. And while we remain stuck in place, others are moving full steam ahead.
Take China. The story is no longer about 'cheap production'. It's about speed, scale, industrialisation and technology in one fell swoop. And that forces us to come to an uncomfortable conclusion: if we want to remain competitive, we need to come up with better solutions faster. Not next year. Now.
Maar hier is het eerlijke probleem: we behandelen innovatie nog te vaak als iets dat “van boven” moet komen. Een directie die een innovatieprogramma lanceert. Een consultant die post-its op een muur plakt. Een innovatie-afdeling die ideeën verzamelt, er drie uit kiest en de rest netjes archiveert. Dat is geen innovatie. Dat is theater.
The real innovation is already within your organisation. It lies with the people who experience the friction every day: the operator who knows where the line is slowing down, the marketer who hears the customer's objections first-hand, the planner who sees where the bottleneck is, the service employee who can already predict the questions. They don't need more PowerPoint presentations. They need space.
Employee-driven innovation: the ideas are there
Employee-driven innovation means no longer viewing improvement and innovation as a hobby project for your spare time. Innovation is a verb. Action that can happen anywhere. You don't push ideas through a bureaucratic funnel; you bring experiments to the fore. You shift from 'prove to us first that it will work' to 'quickly test whether it works'. That is exactly what we need in Europe right now: agility in the workplace, not just ambition in the boardroom.
Start this month, not "someday"
If you take one thing away from this, it should be this: turn on employee-driven innovation today. Not with a slogan, but with five very concrete actions:
- Choose one focus. Link innovations to real pain points: lead time, energy consumption, customer retention, error rates, waste, safety. Employee-driven only really works when it addresses what people feel on a daily basis.
- Make time official. Give each team a fixed innovation moment (for example, half a day every two weeks). Not "when it's quiet", but scheduled, protected, with a mandate.
- Make small experiments normal. No 30-page business cases. Instead, conduct two-week pilots with a simple question: what are we testing, what are we measuring, what are we learning?
- Make it safe to fail. Not fail without commitment, but fail smart. Celebrate not only your successes but also your learnings. And stop holding people accountable for an experiment that was properly discontinued because it didn't work.
- Create a single, clear decision-making process for ideas. One channel, one format, one decision-making moment per month. Quick 'test', quick 'yes', quick 'no'. Communicate. Silence is the best 'innovation killer'.
Stop hoping. Organise it.
In 2026, you won't win with the most beautiful vision, but with the organisation that learns the fastest. And learning doesn't happen in meeting rooms, but in teams that are allowed to try. Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.
Conclusion: if you are reading this as a supervisor, manager, project owner or entrepreneur, do yourself a favour. Stop waiting for the perfect plan. Encourage employee-driven innovation, make time and space for it, and let your people improve the work they are already doing.
Difficult to implement? Get in touch. I'm happy to help. The world is not becoming more stable. So you need to become faster.