Innovation Days for Small Teams

This talk was delivered at the DIG (Digital Interactive Gaming) conference in London, Ontario on November 14, 2012.

It's intended to help people get inspired by learning about how we run our innovation days at The Info-Tech Research Group.

Transcript

1. Innovation Days for Small Teams
3. http://infotech.com
4. Innovation Days What they are, why they are important
5. Why do we need Innovation Days? ✴We pay our people well ✴ We don’t have time to do this ✴ We are afraid we won’t see value trenchescomic.com
6. The Manager’s Job Improve Performance Keep People Happy trenchescomic.com
7. Motivation Intrinsic vs Extrinsic
8. Money Can’t Buy Love Money is a motivator...to a point
9. Three Factors that lead to Better Performance and Personal Satisfaction ✴Autonomy ✴Mastery ✴Purpose trenchescomic.com
10. Autonomy The desire to be self-directed
11. Mastery The opportunity to get better at something
12. Purpose The belief that what you’re doing matters
13. But how?
14. Innovation Days! Intrinsic motivation through innovation
15. <Boring History>
16. Attribution: Flickr User TimothyJ
21. Google Time ✴20% of your time ✴Anything you want to do ✴Gmail ✴Google Wave ✴Chrome Operating System
22. Innovation Days ✴Once a Quarter ✴24 Hours ✴Anything you want to do*
23. NOW WAIT JUST A MINUTE! You’re saying that people will get together and work hard on really cool things for nothing more than a little recognition? I don’t believe it!
26. Open Source Software Tons of examples of tons of developers giving tons of time
27. </Boring History>
28. Innovation Days! Intrinsic motivation through innovation
29. Benefits of Innovation Days ✴Improved Morale ✴Better Developers ✴Better Relationships ✴Cool Shippable Products trenchescomic.com
30. Innovation Day Setups Three Different Ways We Have Set Up Innovation Days
31. Pre-Selected Teams
32. Pre-Selected Teams •The organizer chose teams, put 6-8 people together on a team •Looked at fit, skill sets, and strong leadership •Pros: Inclusion, teams were well balanced •Cons: Lack of autonomy, not necessarily common goals
33. Self-Selected Teams
34. Self-Selected Teams •Allowed teams to self organize, with as many or as few people as you wanted to have •Pros: Autonomy, common goals •Cons: Not balanced, sometimes exclusionary
35. Hybrid Selection
36. Hybrid Selection •Teams were allowed to self select into 2-8 person teams, people not on a team were assigned to teams that they would fit. •Pros: Common goals, primarily self selected, inclusionary •Cons: Not completely autonomous
37. This is how we Innovate! What does an average Innovation Day look like?
38. Assigning an Organizer
39. Team Creation •A flurry of emails •A lot of collusion •Ideas are shared •Varied skill sets looked at •Individuals who don’t have a team let the organizer know
40. Idea Brainstorm •The first 30 minutes of the day is for idea brainstorming •Come up with an idea, how you’ll do it, and a pitch • (When we moved to self selection, we had this done before launch day)
41. Pitch Meeting •The department gets together •Pitches are presented •Bad pitches are rejected via boos (so far, never happened)
42. Work on the Idea •You have until noon the next day to work on your idea •No rules around where you work •No rules around how long you work •One output needs to be a slide presentation
43. Results Meeting •Department gathers together at noon the next day •Executives from the rest of the company are invited •There is cake and beer •Teams present their innovation along with next steps
44. Voting and the Winner All of the innovation ideas are put on a board Everyone puts a sticky note under the idea they think should win The team that is voted the winner gets a cool iron-on patch
45. The Aftermath The winning team is allowed to complete their innovation idea. Executives can sponsor other ideas and have them completed.
46. LET’S INNOVATE! Time to form teams
47. Form Teams! (assigned teams)
48. Brainstorm an Idea Subject: Specific improvement to the DIG Conference
49. What you’re going to do: Get together with your teams. Figure out an idea. Make a 30 second pitch Assign a leader to deliver the pitch to the room
50. You have 5 minutes... and...go!
51. The Pitches
52. LET’S VOTE!!!
53. What We Learned
54. Lessons Learned: •Include Executives at the review meeting •Size of team can be anything from 2-8 comfortably •We don’t let people opt out •Include “next steps” with a rough project breakdown •Self selection is better than assignments
55. How to succeed at Innovation Days DO NOT offer a REWARD trenchescomic.com
56. How to succeed at Innovation Days Make it MANDATORY trenchescomic.com
57. How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t make RULES* trenchescomic.com
58. How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t assign IDEAS trenchescomic.com
59. How to succeed at Innovation Days Arrange teams to Start trenchescomic.com
60. How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t let poison Flourish trenchescomic.com
61. Let me repeat that... “Some people will look forward to working 24 hours straight and will count down the days until they can do it again.”
62. BUT, BUT, BUT! ✴We pay our people well ✴ We don’t have time to do this ✴ We are afraid we won’t see value trenchescomic.com
63. We Pay Our People Well!
64. We don’t have time!
65. We might not see value!
66. Info-Tech’s Innovations
67. Innovation: “Likes” on content Led to related items suggestions (if you like this, you may like that). Helped add interactivity to a fairly static website. Increased page views because of deep linking.
68. Innovation: Vendor Landscape App Improved SEO lead generation Created a better experience for our customers Saw significant traffic increase to the Vendor Landscape area
69. Innovation: Performance Evaluation Application Simplified the creation and delivery of twice annual performance evaluations Is being streamlined and productized
70. Innovation: IT Blog One place to keep all of our cool stuff Good place to direct people to Our sales force likes the different perspective
71. Innovation: 147 Points of Technical Debt Reduction 5 People, working for 24 hours Did the work of 7 people for 5 days Bonded as a team
72. Innovation: Social Media Lead Generation Higher conversions More sales ready leads Lower acquisition cost for new customers
73. Innovation: Training Decks/ New Hire Onboarding Plan Made bringing new people on board easy First week retrospectives have improved
74. Not the tip of the iceberg!
75. Info-Tech’s Innovations often become our most valuable projects
76. Watch This Talk On Our Blog Innovation Days for Small Teams http://itblog.infotech.com/talks
77. @briangarside Tag Tweets with #diginnovate Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter #diginnovate
78. Info-Tech is Hiring!
79. ReWork by 37 Signals: This talk was inspired by: http://37signals.com/rework Drive by Daniel Pink: http://www.danpink.com/books/drive The Trenches (webcomic): http://trenchescomic.com