Jobster has a “20% for innovation program” for our developer team, loosely modeled on Google’s 20% program. We consider the program a success because it has resulted in several interesting features that will graduate into the core product and that are important to our business (for example, relationship based job feeds, Jobster groups, and Jobster rank for prospects.)

In this post (part of a “continuing series on innovation”:/blog/category/innovation) I’d like to share some of the features that we’ve identified as important for a successful innovation program.

Doing repeatable innovation is hard. A number of ingredients have to come together: the right people, the right investment and buy in, the right relationships and rituals for collaborating on innovation, and the right process for translating innovation into product.

First, a successful innovation program requires the right people on the boat… the sort of developer who will get bored and quit the company if not given the chance to innovate, who can combine technical creativity with an understanding of the overall business to come up with something unique. A past post on “hiring innovators”:http://thebogles.com/blog/2005/09/hiring-innovators/ talks about ways to help identify these people.

Second, 20% for innovation requires that upper management truly buys into the concept and all of its ramifications.

• Innovation isn’t free: 20% for innovation means investing 20% of your development resources towards that goal, and accounting for that investment in the schedule and the engineering budget. I consider it a great credit to our CEO Jason Goldberg that he fully bought into the concept and the investment that entails.
• Along with investment of resources, innovation requires a considerable amount of trust. It’s easy to desire an innovation program, but then want to add on twelve layers of approval to make sure that the innovation is relevant and likely to succeed. That defeats the purpose of the program, which is to enable smart people to go a bit out on a limb without spending all of their energy achieving consensus first.
• Reserving 20% for innovation requires accurate scheduling. If you attempt to reserve 20% for innovation but underestimate the time required for your release by 50%, not a whole lot of innovation is going to happen. Jobster is blessed to have a Alan Steele as our VP of Engineering; he has an uncanny ability to derive accurate schedule estimates and ship on time.

Third, innovation requires the right processes and rituals to increase the likelihood that the innovation is relevant and finds its ways into the product. The great thing about innovation is that it can lead to collaboration between different parts of the organization that otherwise interact too rarely.

A key Jobster ritual is the innovation bash. It’s an informal, social affair rather than death by Powerpoint. There are snacks and drinks; a gathering of folks from across the company wanders casually from desk to desk, and developers show off their projects followed by discussion. The gathering considers how the features can be used and how they can be improved to solve problems in the business. The net effect is a sharing of ideas and needs, and a cementing of ties and relationships across the company.

Finally, the right innovations need to find their way into the product. I think Google has the right idea with their Google Labs, and we’re emulating this feature in a Jobster labs, which will be unveiled shortly in our 2.0 release. Labs are important because many ideas will fail or at least not be ready for primetime in their initial conception. You need to carve off a space in your application or service were it’s OK to take risks and fail, and where the testing requirements are reduced. A failure in the labs must not cause scale or security problems in the core product, or serious harm to the consumer. Customers must be given realistic expections in the terms of service (and in line or two of text they actually read!) about the things that might go wrong.

Though it isn’t free, a good innovation program pays off greatly in the medium to long run. It delivers features that would never happen otherwise, or that would cost much more under a standard process. Equally important, it helps attract and retain the best people.

This post is part of a “continuing series”:http://thebogles.com/blog/category/jobster/innovation on growing a culture of innovation.

One of my favorite measures of prospective coworkers– after they’ve passed the minimal bars of fit and experience– is to
hear about hear about a project that they’ve worked on that wasn’t their job. It could be a pet project they’ve done on their own, or an open source project they contribute to, or even a charity they volunteer for.

With surprising frequency, it’s possible to predict they likelihood that they’ll get the job, and the likelihood that they’ll be an innovator, based on the way they describe the project and the things that they did. This accuracy is surprising because more traditional questions often fail to give accurate results in the limited space of an interview. Candidates are often well prepared for standard questions, even probing technical ones, so it’s easy to game the system.

Creating useful technical innovations requires a combination of technical insight and an understanding of customer and business needs– a broader view than is typically required if you’re just doing your job or doing what your told.

A project outside of work forces you take this broader view– you might be one part marketer, one part technical writer, one part tester, program manager and developer– and this broader view develops skills that are invaluable in creating innovation within the workplace.

Outside interests naturally also demonstrate a depth of commitment, passion, and entrepreneurial spirit beyond that required every day in the workplace.

A good side project can be offshoot of work, community of service, or even both. For instance, Mark Swardstrom is doing some great work to help the “Team in Training”:http://www.teamintraining.org/hm_tnt charity recruit volunteers using Jobster. The results of this work benefit not only a worthwhile charity but also Jobster, by adding useful features to the core product such as an events feature Mark added. Before he started at Jobster, Mark worked on a side project called “Poster”:http://www.mobmentality.com/, a simple but powerful website editor. Totally different projects, same underlying drive.

I could tell similar stories about each of the other members of the Jobster team, which is why coming to work each day is such fun.

My top goal at Jobster is to ensure that we have a sustainable culture of innovation that’s relevant to the goals of the business. That another way of saying that Jobster should remain a fun place to work for the sorts of people we need to hire.

Easy to say, hard to do. This post is the first in a “series”:http://thebogles.com/blog/category/jobster/innovation on growing a culture of innovation. I don’t claim to have all the answers, but it’s something I care about a great a deal. Most of all, I’d like to open up a discussion with other people with the same interest and learn for each other.

Reams have been written on the topics of managing innovation and corporate culture. To poke fun at a straw man: some would have you believe that if managers could just come up with the right org chart and mission statement, they could turns the people they have into an innovation machine.

No doubt I’m trivializing a lot of good thinking that has gone on, but I do have a fundamental difference of opinion with the thought that you can “manage� innovation.

Growing a culture of innovation is fundamentally an organic, human process. It’s exhilarating because it requires employees to connect as real people rather than cogs, because it’s about about creativity rather than bureacracy, trust rather than safety, ritual and story telling rather than process and certainty.

The best you can to foster innovation is:

* Hire inherently innovative people.
* Create right relationships of trust and the right communication flows so the innovation is relevant and so that it ships.
* Get the hell out of the way and don’t kill it.

(It also doesn’t hurt to know that you’re in an “innovate or die� business—nothing like the threat of death to help management resist the slide into mediocrity.)

Innovation is hard because it challenges so many of our traditional notions of management. The concept that some people are fundamentally capable of innnovation—and some aren’t—is a radical and perhaps upsetting one. We’d all like to believe that with the right management skills and coaching we could turn lead into gold.
But if only some prospecive employees are innovators, then it becomes critically important to be able to recognize and hire the innovators.

This introduces _Topic 1: It’s hard enough to find people who are merely well qualified, so how do you recognize and attract people with the intangible quality of innovation?_

Once you’ve hired the right people, the challenge is to create room for innovation and to ensure that the innovation sees the light of day in the product. Nothing is more frustrating than to create innovation which never ships, and so many things can block it from happening.

For innovation to become product, it needs to relevant to the business. This means that everyone in the company needs to have a far deeper understanding of the whole business than is traditionally the case. This is partly a function of hiring people who like to have that global understanding, and partly a function of growing a culture that enables employees to obtain that understanding.

_Topic 2: How do you grow a culture that lets innovation become product?_

Shipping innovation requires a high degree of trust and willingness to take risk. Truly innovative work requires a depth of thinking which can be difficult to fully convey to management, and often a degree of risk which makes management uncomfortable. Innovation requires an investment of time and resources—it can’t happen if you don’t schedule for it.

_Topic 3: How do you invest in and reward innovative work?_

Lastly, innovation requires sustained excellence in project management, scheduling, and execution. Teams can’t innovate if they are perpetually on death marches to ship.

_Topic 4: How do you fit innovation into an already chock full schedule?_

Follow up posts on each of these topics will arrive in the following weeks; I’ll also archive the entire collection in a section of the Jobster category page.