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Innovation Days for Small Teams

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http://infotech.com

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Innovation Days What they are, why they are important

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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

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The Manager’s Job Improve Performance Keep People Happy trenchescomic.com

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Motivation Intrinsic vs Extrinsic

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Money Can’t Buy Love Money is a motivator...to a point

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Three Factors that lead to Better Performance and Personal Satisfaction ✴Autonomy ✴Mastery ✴Purpose trenchescomic.com

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Autonomy The desire to be self-directed

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Mastery The opportunity to get better at something

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Purpose The belief that what you’re doing matters

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But how?

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Innovation Days! Intrinsic motivation through innovation

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Attribution: Flickr User TimothyJ

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Google Time ✴20% of your time ✴Anything you want to do ✴Gmail ✴Google Wave ✴Chrome Operating System

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Innovation Days ✴Once a Quarter ✴24 Hours ✴Anything you want to do*

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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!

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Open Source Software Tons of examples of tons of developers giving tons of time

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Innovation Days! Intrinsic motivation through innovation

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Benefits of Innovation Days ✴Improved Morale ✴Better Developers ✴Better Relationships ✴Cool Shippable Products trenchescomic.com

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Innovation Day Setups Three Different Ways We Have Set Up Innovation Days

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Pre-Selected Teams

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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

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Self-Selected Teams

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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

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Hybrid Selection

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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

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This is how we Innovate! What does an average Innovation Day look like?

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Assigning an Organizer

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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

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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)

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Pitch Meeting •The department gets together •Pitches are presented •Bad pitches are rejected via boos (so far, never happened)

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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

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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

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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

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The Aftermath The winning team is allowed to complete their innovation idea. Executives can sponsor other ideas and have them completed.

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LET’S INNOVATE! Time to form teams

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Form Teams! (assigned teams)

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Brainstorm an Idea Subject: Specific improvement to the DIG Conference

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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

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You have 5 minutes... and...go!

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The Pitches

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LET’S VOTE!!!

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What We Learned

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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

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How to succeed at Innovation Days DO NOT offer a REWARD trenchescomic.com

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How to succeed at Innovation Days Make it MANDATORY trenchescomic.com

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How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t make RULES* trenchescomic.com

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How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t assign IDEAS trenchescomic.com

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How to succeed at Innovation Days Arrange teams to Start trenchescomic.com

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How to succeed at Innovation Days Don’t let poison Flourish trenchescomic.com

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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.”

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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

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We Pay Our People Well!

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We don’t have time!

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We might not see value!

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Info-Tech’s Innovations

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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.

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Innovation: Vendor Landscape App Improved SEO lead generation Created a better experience for our customers Saw significant traffic increase to the Vendor Landscape area

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Innovation: Performance Evaluation Application Simplified the creation and delivery of twice annual performance evaluations Is being streamlined and productized

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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

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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

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Innovation: Social Media Lead Generation Higher conversions More sales ready leads Lower acquisition cost for new customers

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Innovation: Training Decks/ New Hire Onboarding Plan Made bringing new people on board easy First week retrospectives have improved

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Not the tip of the iceberg!

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Info-Tech’s Innovations often become our most valuable projects

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Watch This Talk On Our Blog Innovation Days for Small Teams http://itblog.infotech.com/talks

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@briangarside Tag Tweets with #diginnovate Let’s continue the conversation on Twitter #diginnovate

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Info-Tech is Hiring!

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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