Innovation Is Not a Department — It’s the Mindset of Every Employee. Salto Talks Ep. 2 | Monika Sońta

Companies spend fortunes on ideathons, design sprints, and motivational speakers — only to do everything they can to control what comes out of them. Why does innovation in corporations so often die before it even begins?
That’s what I discussed with Dr. Monika Sońta — an expert in communication, creativity, and artificial intelligence in education, and an Assistant Professor at Kozminski University. In her work, Monika bridges academia and the real challenges faced by organizations — from building employee engagement, through developing creativity, to designing organizational cultures grounded in diversity and quality of working life.

After my conversation with Maciek Sadowski about startups, we now turn to what happens inside large organizations — and why intrapreneurship, job crafting, and a culture of agency are the topics that will determine whether a company survives the next decade. Or not.
With this conversation, I’m opening up the topic of innovation culture and intrapreneurship on Salto Talks, which I’ll continue exploring in future episodes.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

🔹 Innovation is a mindset, not a job title — why the model of “an innovation department with five chosen people” is doomed to fail, and what innovation looks like when it truly works — every day, at every level of the organization.

🔹 Intrapreneurship: a 50-year-old concept that Poland still ignores — what real internal entrepreneurship looks like beyond sending employees to an ideathon once a year, and how a culture of external control holds Polish organizations back.

🔹 Job crafting, agency, and workplace belonging — why having a sense of influence over your own work is not a soft perk, but a hard competitive advantage. And how to measure it.

🔹 The paradox of innovation in corporations — companies invest in motivational speakers, idea boxes, and design sprints, while at the same time doing everything they can to control the outcomes of those initiatives. How do we break that cycle?

🔹 From Design Thinking to Futures Thinking — why a linear approach to innovation is starting to fail in the VUCA/BANI/RUPT era, and what scenario thinking means as an organizational strategy.

🔹 Remote work vs. innovation culture — can intrapreneurship really be built through Teams and Slack? The honest answer: not entirely. And why the “protein interface” still matters.

Podcast available in video format on YouTube:
👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRZSljzKSt

And available to listen on popular podcast platforms:
👉 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4QTpj9xNZl97fP74F4M3lc?si=0f4FGr3LQDaIHyFM6LK6mw
👉 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/salto-talks/id1884130222?l=pl&i=1000757239187

Guest: Dr. Monika Sońta – LinkedIn – / monikasonta

🔗 4InnoPipe2 Project (EIT): https://www.kozminski.edu.pl/pl/4innopipe2-strengthening-innovation-pipelines-impactful-universities-20

Host: Piotr Nejman – https://www.saltostrategies.com

Timestamps:

00:00 Innovation bigger than the Gutenberg revolution?
01:38 Who is Monika Sońta
03:10 What innovation really is (without the buzzwords)
08:40 Why “just delivering” kills innovation
11:46 Intrapreneurship — entrepreneurship within organizations
14:46 Why we are afraid of entrepreneurship in Poland
18:45 The paradox of innovation in corporations
23:04 Innovation: survival or growth?
30:11 Job crafting — how to regain influence over your work
34:33 Poland vs. the Balkans — who builds innovation better
43:05 Has design thinking come to an end?
45:57 Emerging reality — the end of linear models
50:25 Futures thinking — how to think about the future
54:26 The 4InnoPipe2 project — entrepreneurship as a lifestyle
01:01:32 Does remote work kill innovation?
01:05:41 3 key takeaways