Innovation is essential for the existence and endurance of technology companies, so having professionals working on more experimental projects does not constitute a concession, but rather a business necessity. One way to encourage ideas to flourish is through formal programs in which, after a certain period in a department or project, the employee is encouraged to do something in a different part of the company.
New ways of looking at old problems often generate surprising solutions, and many organizations do have programs in place where, if an employee wants to change jobs within the company, they are encouraged as long as they have a good performance review and the manager for the area where they want to work welcomes them.
Having common engineering tools makes it easier for people to move between projects and departments. Imagine what a waste of time it would be if employees had to learn a new programming language and new tools every time they join a project.
New projects don’t always attract many people, because they have less impact on the present and are often seen merely as experiments or speculations. Sometimes it takes years before an area has a product to deploy into production, but it’s part of the investment in innovation to support teams like this.
Leaders need to encourage their teams to work on exploratory projects that have neither present impact nor glamour yet. While it is certainly true that each person’s appetite for professional risk is unique (and dependent on their life circumstances at the time), managers must encourage career moves and point out the advantages of sometimes creating something entirely from scratch, even if its use is still uncertain.
Leaders need to encourage their teams to work on exploratory projects that have neither present impact nor glamour yet.
Vehicles for ideas to shine
On the other hand, in a corporate environment with inexperienced and professionally or personally immature employees, it can be costly to open the innovation gates indiscriminately. If everyone were allowed to work on whatever they wanted, without backing their proposals with technical knowledge, the situation could soon become chaotic.
Career paths are a good way of avoiding too much risk: after a certain level of seniority, engineers can be granted more autonomy to decide how to prioritize their projects. Hackathons and demo days are also a great vehicle for a company to evaluate what is being done during more experimental working hours of certain professionals or teams and for employees to showcase their projects and prototypes.
Conscious investment in a balanced mix of H1, H2, and H3 horizon projects prevents a business from settling for its bread-and-butter only, which will inevitably be copied by the competition and make a successful company lose its edge.
Bread and butter + innovation
Business as usual (BAU), or a company’s H1 investments, is what currently generates value for the company, whether it’s the Office suite or Microsoft’s cloud service. There needs to be a budget available to operate these products at the highest level.
Many people don’t understand that once a system or service is in production, it still must be operated because improvements and maintenance will always be needed. Every time someone uses Google Meet, for example, they are using a service that requires constant monitoring so that it runs smoothly on Google’s servers.
The operational cost of keeping these products running for any technology company is high. However, a company that only focuses on BAU and doesn’t invest in innovation, has no way of growing beyond a certain point and will end up being left behind.
The market sees the value of a technology company precisely in what it has to offer besides its bread-and-butter product or service. What the market is betting on is that the company will be able to innovate on what it is already offering today. It’s as if the market is confident that, overnight, Google may create another YouTube or Meta may launch another platform as popular as Instagram.
Platform mindset
For a technology company, this potential translates strongly into building engineering platforms that allow it to scale the size and complexity of future offerings.
Engineering platforms allow companies like Uber, which originated as a passenger transportation service, to expand its scope to include the delivery of goods, food, and freight, or Netflix, which started as a mail-order movie rental company, to move on to video streaming producing its own content.
Companies like these created robust platforms to fuel growth, which in turn enabled new product offerings and nurtured an environment of innovation. These were intentional decisions, guided by a platform mindset, that diversified their business and prepared them for the uncertainties of the future.
For great innovations to come to fruition, an unquestionable ingredient is the creativity that lives within the people who make up the company. There may be funds to create products and a positive work environment, but the protagonists are the professionals who need to be there to make it all happen.
For great innovations to come to fruition, an unquestionable ingredient is the creativity that lives within the people who make up the company.
Marcus Fontoura
Marcus Fontoura is a technical fellow and CTO for Azure Core at Microsoft, and author of A Platform Mindset. He works on efforts related to large-scale distributed systems, data centers, and engineering productivity. Fontoura has had several roles as an architect and research scientist in big tech companies, such as Yahoo! and Google, and was most recently the CTO at Stone, a leading Brazilian fintech.
