Terkel guest blog: How do you foster innovation in your tech organization?
Innovation is the lifeblood of any technology organization, but how do leaders foster it? We asked 10 top executives, from founders and CEOs to a head of development, to share their strategies. From cultivating a culture of experimentation to promoting employee initiative and market trend analysis, discover the diverse ways these leaders encourage innovation within their teams.
- Cultivating a Culture of Experimentation
- Implementing the Innovation Accelerator Technique
- Encouraging Your Team Through Product Bets
- Fostering Teamwork Through Strategic Autonomy
- Keeping Tech Fun to Gain AI Familiarity
- Providing Paid Training Days to Learn New Tech
- Hiring Internationally Achieves Customer Alignment
- Incorporating Flat Management to Avoid Hierarchy
- Using a Customer-Driven Innovation Strategy
- Promoting Employee Initiative and Market Trend Analysis
Cultivating a Culture of Experimentation
At Breachsense, one strategy we implement to foster innovation is to cultivate a culture of experimentation and risk-taking. We encourage team members to dedicate time for independent projects and research, allowing them to explore new ideas and technologies.
We facilitate knowledge sharing and collaboration across teams through brainstorming sessions and hackathons. We created open communication channels and feedback mechanisms to encourage idea-sharing and diverse perspectives.
Rewarding innovative contributions is prioritized to motivate and incentivize creativity. By creating an environment that embraces experimentation, supports risk-taking, and values innovation, we’re able to leverage the latest technologies to deliver cutting-edge solutions.
Josh Amishav, Founder and CEO, Breachsense
Implementing the Innovation Accelerator Technique
The “Innovation Accelerator” is one technique I use to promote innovation within my technology company. This strategy focuses on developing a setting that promotes innovation, teamwork, and ongoing learning.
I create cross-functional teams made up of people from various backgrounds to encourage a melting pot of ideas and viewpoints. This guarantees a variety of creative options. Then, regardless of their position in the hierarchy, I support a culture that is open and inclusive and gives team members the freedom to express their ideas.
I allot specific time for exploration and experimentation, enabling staff to work on passion projects or solve challenging issues that could result in game-changing inventions. I foster an environment that promotes innovation, ignites creativity, and promotes continuous improvement within my technology organization by putting the Innovation Accelerator strategy into practice.
Rodney Warner, CEO, Connective Web Design
Encouraging Your Team Through Product Bets
As a company whose primary product is a software platform, encouraging innovation within our R&D function is a key part of our practice. We use a templated process called a product bet.
Anyone in the company can submit a bet, which is reviewed in our quarterly planning. This ensures that innovation is a three-legged stool: strategic priorities, customer requests, and good ideas from within the rest of the company.
Trevor Ewen, COO, QBench
Fostering Teamwork Through Strategic Autonomy
Autonomy is the key word to promote innovation in tech organizations. It helps teams leave their comfort zone to accept challenges. With a defined and strategic autonomy (for teams) that is well aligned with the organization’s culture, the teams get ready to accept challenges, and innovation stems automatically.
Encouraged by the autonomous culture, teams propose new solutions to complex problems which have not been tried yet but offer promising growth benefits. It helps promote dialogue, resulting in teams’ integration of collaborative work approaches and paves novel ways for innovative solutions to compete in the most technical and advanced business scenarios.
Lou Reverchuk, Co-founder and CEO, EchoGlobal
Keeping Tech Fun to Gain AI Familiarity
Encouraging innovation at my firm starts with keeping tech fun. Take, for example, ChatGPT. I noticed my children experimenting with the application in a way that my workers weren’t. Using this new tool solely for productivity might feel like the right thing for an employee to do, but it can stifle innovation.
To see the full breadth of possibilities inherent in new tech, loosen up a bit and have fun with it. Prompting ChatGPT to write limericks in the style of Tupac seems like a waste of time, but in actuality, drives a familiarity with the tech that’s hard to achieve with a more rigid approach. Once I encouraged my workforce to have fun with AI, they found surprising ways to use it in the office.
Rob Reeves, CEO and President, Redfish Technology
Providing Paid Training Days to Learn New Tech
I run a marketing agency that works with B2B technology companies to speed up their marketing. We’re a band of merry marketing geeks who love tech, use it frequently, and even make our own apps when the mood takes us.
To encourage innovation, we offer 12 paid training days at my organization, which employees can book out themselves using our HR system, Turbine. With those training days, employees are encouraged to do courses, learn, try new things, and run experiments.
It’s a great way to provide earmarked time for this kind of activity, and has resulted in many improvements to the business as a whole, because we share what we learn, so everyone can benefit.
Matthew Stibbe, CEO, Articulate Marketing
Hiring Internationally Achieves Customer Alignment
We’ve been international from day one, which came with its own pluses and minuses, but one of the best ways I’ve found to encourage innovation is to hire experts from the geographies in which they will operate.
The reasoning was that they will know how business should be done in their areas, the kinds of features that will resonate most strongly, and the cultural context to move us in the right direction to more closely align us with our customers. Innovation in my book.
Dragos Badea, CEO, Yarooms
Incorporating Flat Management to Avoid Hierarchy
A rigid hierarchy can be detrimental to fostering innovation at work. You won’t be able to realize the full potential of your business if your staff works submissively and only considers innovation when specifically directed to do so.
We strive to have a strong, flat management style that encourages employees to break down organizational boundaries and silos. Cross-pollination between teams and departments, as well as the sharing of problems and ideas, contribute significantly to innovation.
Stoyan Mitov, CEO, Dreamix LTD
Using a Customer-Driven Innovation Strategy
Very often we come up with an idea, develop it, and hope the customers will like it. But we try to steer away from that. The person who is best positioned to know what the customer wants is the customer. Of course, they don’t all want the same things.
So we need to poll ideas across the customer groups and the leads that are not yet customers. Listening is a skill. The more you do it, the better you get, and the more you can connect the dots where the gaps in the market are.
In the best case, you have the first customers already financing some of the development and then sales go out and find more customers for this use case. Stop trying to be the product visionary but become the execution guru and the architecture ninja.
Dag Flachet, Co-founder and Professor, Codific
Promoting Employee Initiative and Market Trend Analysis
I support initiative and creativity among employees. We welcome new ideas and take them seriously, rather than dismissing them. This way, all employees can be confident that their initiative or bright idea will not go unnoticed and this applies to both large-scale ideas and small suggestions for improving the overall process. This concerns the internal source of ideas.
We constantly analyze market trends and strive to take an active, rather than a lagging, position. We are not afraid to do what no one else has done yet. For example, our communication platform now has functionality that was previously only found in social networks, and we were the first to take the risk of implementing it.
Seeing how the company’s management operates, employees also become more proactive in developing ideas. So, in this case, it is important to set a personal example as well.
Vage Zakaryan, Head of Development, Gem4me