A while ago I blogged about companies providing time to their employees to innovate. Google do it, Atlassian are trialling it and being public about it. Here are some updates from the Atlassian blog on the trial so far.

Cheers.

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

It’s always good to look at successful organisations and try to learn from some of their practices/experience. Some time ago we looked at Google and their ‘20% time’ for engineers. Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their time free to work on what they are really passionate about. As well as hopefully making Google a better place to work for their engineers (not that it would have been that bad any way!) a number of successful Google products have emerged as a result of this initiative.

I recently attended a ‘breakfast seminar’ where Mike Cannon-Brookes of Atlassian talked about his company. Atlassian have just started a 20% time trial of their own. On the Atlassian blog you can find out all the details of this trial, how it works, why they are doing it etc but what is really interesting is the open and very public approach they are taking with it. Atlassian staff are being encouraged to blog everything about the trial, what works, what doesn’t, how they feel about it etc. While we know about Google’s 20% time and what some of the products that have emerged from it are, Mike argues we don’t really know much about how it works in practice. Atlassian are going to find out for themselves and let the world know through their blog. This will be very interesting to follow and I look forward to seeing the blog posts appearing in their developer blog.

Atlassian estimate that their trial is going to cost US$1,000,000 - a serious investment given the size of their company. At education.au we have quite a number of software engineers and it would be great to adopt this sort of practice as well. In addition to software engineers we have quite a number of professionals from Education and Training who, if given 20% of their time to devote to something they are passionate about, would no doubt end up adding a lot of value to our company. The reality of course for us is that quite simply, this is not going to happen. We are not in a position to do something like this but what sort of organisations are? Take Google and Atlassian for example. Both are successful technology companies that have the financial capacity to implement such programs. One is publicly listed and one is private. Is it feasible or even acceptable for say, not for profit organisations or government departments to try similar programs? How about other professions and trades? Surely software engineers are not the only ones who can benefit from and add value back to their organisations and customers through such initiatives. Think about your job for a moment - what could you do if you were given a day a week to do something related to your work that you are passionate about and what sort of benefits would ultimately come back to your organisation and its customers?

The ‘catch 22′ for me is that in order for us to be in a position to do this, we would already had to have done it successfully and be reaping the benefits to be in a position to do it!

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back

An interesting article on incubators, proof of concepts, innovation and ‘laying eggs’ on the ‘process of innovation’ blog has me thinking about innovating, incubating etc. I have had a couple of conversations with Mike (author of the article) recently in relation to what incubators etc are all about. Mike uses the analogy of the egg incubator. The end product in this case is the chicken, which I suppose could be considered the ‘end product’ or something that you could take to the market. Mike talks about understanding what your end product really is, be it the chook or maybe a piece of software. Do you want to sell the software or could you ‘open source’ it and leverage the expertise you have gained in developing it through implementation and support services.
How about keeping the ‘chook’, let it lay more eggs and get some re-use going?
An important concept for me with innovating is the discovery process. You may find out along the way that lots of people have the ability to incubate ‘chooks’ and the end product may be one of many in a very fierce, competitive marketplace. However, you may have some differentiators that are worth exploring. It could turn out that you build very good ‘hen houses’ or hatcheries that provide a safe, warm incubating environment or your management processes are leading practice. By examining your incubating environment it may turn out that you discover you have many more interesting and valuable assets that you could take to your market.

Cheers,
Jerry.

technorati tags: innovation,
incubator

Original post by jleeson and software by Elliott Back