Disclaimer: MS Employee
To add to his comments about higher-ups dismissing his ideas. I don't know if the OP was in a technical role or not. But I regularly see emails from guys in my team with some radical new idea that they think will work. In 99.99% of the cases, the ideas don't work (Scalability issues, cost, complexity etc). It's very important for employees to also accept and see the flaws in your ideas rather than start bawling and throwing a fit. Likewise, it's very important for the leadership to keep encouraging these ideas no matter how stupid they are.
Our partner/principal SDEs do just that. They're always open to new ideas. This probably varies wildly from team to team though.