On Innovation in big companies

These notes are from BarcampPhilly ’08 that were lost in the depths of my computer’s hard disk and I only just found again. At the event, a few of us from CIM held a round table discussion on innovation, especially developer led innovation in big companies. Here are the points that people mentioned:

• Innovation only comes from free cycles, even the best ideas need time to be thought through
• Leverage something thats existing rather than a brand new idea
• Agile development can actually hurt innovation with too much transparency. Its hard to justify something that you may feel has a long term win
• Technical managers should whet the ideas of their team members
• Innovation comes from bottom almost never from top
• Innovation = Risk
• True story: At AOL, the AOL IM service was declared a risk
• Constraints actually push innovation
• Innovation wont happen without proper incentives/rewards.
• How about cross team innovation. How do designers/developers collaborate to innovate?

So this has only taken almost a year to put up, with BarcampPhilly ’09 coming up soon. Since then there has been a few opportunities within CIM to push bottom-up innovation, including a labweek for all of engineering.