Overview
By shifting from open ideation to a challenge-driven approach, TD Bank aligned innovation directly with real business priorities. With more than 100,000 ideas submitted, 16,000 solutions delivered, and participation from over 10,000 employees, the bank's iD8 program has proven the power of structured innovation. The result: stronger alignment, higher-quality solutions, and a culture that believes no idea is too big or too small.
The Challenge
TD Bank’s open funnel approach to crowdsourcing often led to a misalignment between submitted ideas and strategic goals. With an overwhelming volume of submissions, various lines of business faced challenges in triaging ideas, finding business partners, and ensuring alignment with annual budgets and forecasts.
Open funnel = unclear value
“One challenge with the open funnel model was managing the sheer volume of submissions, which burdened teams and made it difficult to demonstrate clear value to business partners and management.”
– Josh Death, VP of Intellectual Property and Ideation at TD Bank
The Solution
To overcome these challenges, TD Bank introduced a challenge-driven innovation framework within iD8 to complement its existing open funnel approach.
While open ideation remains a vital channel for gathering diverse perspectives and ideas from colleagues, the challenge-driven approach focuses on targeted problem-solving, aligning innovation efforts with specific business objectives.
This addition emphasizes executive sponsorship, clear incentives, and a structured process to guide employees toward impactful contributions, ensuring that innovation efforts can deliver meaningful and measurable results.
Pivoting to a best practice
“Historically, our platform passively collected incremental innovation ideas. With guidance from HYPE, we adopted the challenge-driven approach as a best practice—adding targeted challenges to the existing open funnel model to drive more strategic, impactful innovation.”
– Josh Death
The Interplay of People, Process, Environment, and Product in Driving Creativity at TD Bank
- Innovation Management: Drives idea generation but stops short of developing complete solutions.
- Collaboration Culture: Encourages in-person and digital interactions, though discussions can sometimes lack focus and structure.
- Workflow Management: Offers structured processes, routing, and notifications to ensure tasks are completed but does not spark creativity.
What makes iD8 unique?
“The iD8 Program is uniquely positioned for challenge-driven innovation, integrating information systems and collaboration tools to enable focused, purposeful ideation.”
– Vlora Muslimi, Senior Manager, iD8 Program and Colleague Innovation at TD Bank
The Process
Using the HYPE platform’s challenge-driven structure, TD Bank introduced specific steps to encourage purposeful ideation. Each challenge is clearly defined with success criteria, enabling employees to contribute targeted ideas.
TD Bank also leverages head-to-head reviews for robust idea evaluation, ensuring that selected solutions are innovative, feasible, and strategically aligned.
How TD Bank prioritizes ideas
“The beauty of our program is that each line of business has unique criteria for prioritizing ideas. Some prioritize immediate strategic fits, while others take a broader approach. Even if an idea isn’t implemented right away, it remains on the roadmap for future review.”
– Vlora Muslimi
The Pillars of Ideation at TD Bank
Executive Champion Support
E.g. Commitment to fund top solutions or share progress
Purposeful Ideation
E.g. Sponsor an ideation challenge to solve relevant business problems
Enhanced Financial Model
E.g. Focus on solving ideas with customer impact
Rewards and Recognition
E.g. Regular rewards and recognition to highlight the best ideas
Ideation Framework
E.g. Aligning resources to corresponding priorities
Modern Ideation Platform
E.g. Features and integrations that increase engagement
TD Bank’s iD8 innovation champions bring teams together to review, prioritize, and transform promising ideas into practical solutions that create measurable impact for colleagues and customers.
Everyone wins
“Being part of this community that shares, builds solutions, and collaborates impacts not only colleagues but also the customer. The true value lies in fostering a culture of innovation that drives real-world improvements for everyone involved.”
– Vlora Muslimi
The Impact
- Enhanced Employee Engagement: The active participation of executive sponsors and the clear recognition of valuable contributions have increased employee motivation and engagement.
- Strategic Alignment: Ideas generated are now more closely aligned with the bank’s strategic goals, ensuring that innovation efforts contribute directly to business success.
- Higher Quality of Ideas: The focused approach has resulted in higher-quality submissions that are directly applicable to strategic business needs.
- Improved Customer Experience: Solutions developed through this process have addressed key pain points in the customer journey, leading to better customer experiences and higher satisfaction levels.
- Cultural Shift: The organization has embraced a more innovative and customer-focused mindset, driving long-term success and differentiation in a competitive market.
Small ideas = big impact
“With over 100,000 submissions since inception and a clear focus on purposeful, challenge-driven ideation, iD8 continues to drive TD’s innovation culture, proving that even small ideas can make a big impact.”
– Josh Death
The Results
- TD Bank’s patent base grew by 40% in three years, making it the #1 patent filer among financial institutions in Canada, one of the top three among all Canadian companies, and among the top five U.S. clearinghouse banks.
- The TD patent portfolio has expanded to over 2,500 patent filings, an increase of over 110% since 2020.
- One in five patents filed by TD Bank are related to AI innovation, highlighting the bank’s focus on emerging technologies and future-ready solutions.
- Over 16,000 ideas have been successfully implemented since the iD8 program launched in 2019.
- Since its inception, the iD8 program has received over 100,000 idea submissions.
- More than 10,000 colleagues actively contribute and implement ideas, with over 10,000 ideas brought to life through iD8.
- In 2024 alone, more than 1,600 ideas were implemented—delivering the highest value achieved since the program’s inception.
- In 2024, employee capacity hours saved increased by 54% year-over-year.
It’s not just about ROI
“Innovation metrics often emphasize hard KPIs like revenue and profit, but early on, it’s crucial to align with organizational KPIs and showcase value beyond immediate ROI—like reducing customer friction and saving time. Over time, we’ve learned the importance of developing and socializing these less tangible metrics to demonstrate the full impact of the program.”
– Vlora Muslimi
"Instant Code Deployment" Idea
Recognizing the inefficiencies in the existing code deployment process—which required up to 8 hours to push changes through multiple environments—two colleagues streamlined deployment to a cloud-based data engineering platform.
Their solution drastically reduced deployment time to just a few minutes per environment, enhancing developer experience while ensuring system reliability and integrity.
This improvement increased deployment velocity, resulting in 30,888 hours of annual capacity savings. The solution’s scalability across teams offers the potential for even greater time savings and efficiency gains.
TD Bank’s Inventor Community was celebrated on stage at the 9th Patent Inventor Celebration, recognizing innovators whose creativity and solutions are driving meaningful impact across the organization.
The best solutions are...
“Success often comes from cross-pollination across business lines. In some cases, we expected solutions from technical experts, but it was the blend of technical and design teams that delivered the winning idea. This shows that fresh perspectives, not just proximity to the problem, can spark the best solutions.”
– Vlora Muslimi
The Final Word
Starting from scratch?
“If I were starting from scratch, I’d choose a challenge-based approach—it delivers a far higher conversion rate, which keeps innovators engaged, satisfies business needs, and quickly demonstrates real value.”
– Josh Death
We make software that helps companies connect people with ideas, to drive innovation and transformation forward.
