I think a core problem is that people read online and spend a weekend looking into something cool and get a pretty decent POC up and running. But that's a single person in a weekend, nowadays accellerated by LLMs - what they cannot see (or, something that comes with experience) is how expensive or invasive it would be to apply that in your team or company-wide.

But innovation tokens is a neat idea, it's not personal - no big bad grumpy old senior being a square about CoolTech2026 - and it's an incentive to have someone that wants to do something cool think about it. The other one in that regard are ADRs, which I think is a very low barrier to entry path into architecture that most developers can do. It too forces the person to consider CoolTech2026 in a wider context - what does it solve, what is used right now to solve it, what other solutions are out there, etc - plus making it a team decision if executed right.