Consistent Innovation
How to create a cadence for innovations in your company
Innovation drives the future. It keeps your company and your products exciting, relevant and valuable. The hard part about innovation is doing it consistently. More so in fast paced, high impact businesses, where you’re hard pressed by targets, quarterly results and customer success.
How do you regularly come up with and implement kickass new ideas? Can we create a factory of innovations?
These are two questions we’ve been asking ourselves for the last 4 years at CodeNation. CodeNation is the “innovation factory” for the ESW Capital group. We work on coming up with product innovations across the group. After much experimentation, this is what works for us to consistently deliver innovations:
1. Experiment rapidly
Speed is of the essence in innovation. This gives us the freedom to try out a lot of things and make a lot of mistakes. You will fail a couple of times before getting it right, it’s best to fail fast. Remember to:
Maximize speed, not minimize risk.
2. Open communication
Open channels of information create a strong flow of ideas across the team. Information stuck in silos creates little pockets of knowledge, which tremendously reduces innovation. A significant part of creativity is mixing and matching ideas, cross application of concepts. The leadership must create chances for conversation, exchange of ideas and route information across the company.
3. Small, close teams create massive impact
Small teams increases an individual’s impact on the team mission, which drives them to take higher ownership. Small teams are easily aligned, work closely together, and have complete visibility of each other. This encourages high performance.
4. Create an environment that allows taking risks
If people are too afraid to make mistakes, you won’t have a team that dreams big or takes risks. Innovation requires accepting the “possibility of failure”. Don’t nuke a team whose experiment didn’t work out, coach them to salvage the learnings and pick themselves up right after. Encourage taking on hard problems to solve.
5. Hire the smart, hungry and creative ones, make them a part of hiring
A small team of brilliant individuals create “massive impact”. Innovation requires people who can dream, improvise and adapt. Standard hiring process of asking DSA questions (for the developers) isn’t enough for finding good innovators. Have discussions that test the candidates creativity, planning and other skills. Involve everyone from the team in taking interviews. They will understand what are the qualities the company values and also attract like minded talent.
6. Make a framework for various stages of innovation
Deciding on an idea, laying out a vision and plan, making incremental developments, testing the product and all other stages in the life cycle of an innovation should be optimized for speed. Create standard frameworks that help the teams quickly move through each phase of innovation.
7. Have fun
Happy teams achieve more. They can take on harder challenges, and their positivity reflects in the products.
It’s been an interesting journey in figuring out how to build an awesome innovation factory at CodeNation, and we’re still experimenting. If you’re interested in finding out about some of the exciting ideas we’re working on, follow the updates on the CodeNation Engineering blog.
Want to join us in developing interesting product innovations? Look out for our hiring events.
