Promoting Innovation

We recently had an interesting topic to discuss in the internal TechTalks that we organize within our organization. It was about Strategic Innovation. The focal point of the discussion is around the concepts of innovation shared by Geoffrey Moore, one of the renowned authors on innovation. His books "Dealing with Darwin" and "Crossing the chasm" have elaborated the strategic importance and effective measures that can be taken in using innovation as a tool to take organizations to the next level.

One of the key concepts is the technology adoption life cycle. The newer concept introduced in Dealing with Darwin is the concept of Category Maturity Life cycle. The Category maturity lifecycle has the technology adoption lifecycle as the first part of the lifecycle. The technology adoption technology itself has multiple phases in which a new and disruptive technology gets adopted - by techies who just try it, by visionaries who are ahead of the herd, by pragmatists who are with the herd, by conservatives who adopt proven technologies and finally the skeptics who just say no. The technology lifecycle is applicable largely for the disruptive technologies that are in the growth markets. Once the new technology is assimilates, the next phases in the category maturity life cycle kicks in where the transition happens in the order of
Growth Market -> Mature Market -> Declining market -> End of Life

Now, How to make the strategic innovation relevant at the executing layer of the organization? There are some key things for engineers and managers to consider

Engineers
1. Innovation need not always be about the next BIG thing: The common assumption about innovation is that you have to discover a new product, service or something big. In practice, the smallest innovation on a product, service, process or way of working can qualify as innovation.
2. Be a part of it: Make conscious efforts to be part of the action. Look for opportunities in whatever your contributions to do things differently and to do different things.
3. Innovation does not happen in isolation: Get involved with innovation activities. Join forums, peer groups, brainstorming sessions and whatever mechanisms available to exchange ideas
4. Take the ideas forward: It is not necessary that you are coming up with new ideas all the time. Taking forward new ideas by working with cross-functional teams, building on the ideas, getting involved in proof of concepts (POC) are some of the effective ways to get involved

Managers
1. Environment: Create a thriving environment to boost innovation. This means creating sufficient forums for innovators to exchange ideas, providing recognition, and linking rewards to innovation
2. Provide mentoring and coaching support: Support the innovators by providing mentoring or ongoing coaching either by yourself or by linking the engineers with the subject matter experts.
3. Walk the talk: Participate in innovation activities yourself.

Update from India Software Developer Conference 2012

I attended the SiliconIndia India Software Developer Conference event over the weekend (March 24th, 25th, 2012). It has been a great experience with experienced executives from reputed organizations like Bell Labs India, eBay, Intuit, IBM, Dell etc. The most common themes around which the topics revolved are mobility, cloud computing, usability and data analytics.

The keynote sessions touched on the broader trends that are relevant for the software engineers. Vijay Anand from Intuit opened the conference with food for thought on why and how the developers should have customer interactions and how design plays a key role in the overall success. "Design to Delight" is the Mantra Vijay shared. He has also shared the Intuit philosophy of metrics which are not the typical software centric metrics like defects, mean time for resolution etc but the 3 key metrics they use are
1. How quick the feature gets to the customer
2. Are customers using it
3. Are customers/users recommending it to others

Vishy, head of Bell Labs India (A-LU) delivered very interesting talk on Big Data. He presented a historic evolution as well as contemporary landscape of various data management technologies. The key takeaways for me are the new techniques like in-memory processing and the vast amount of new tools that are available today like Redis, CouchDB, MongoDB, Neo4j etc. These are the tools and products that are making the today's social networks with humongous data a reality.

Rajesh Rajendran from eBay has shared the characteristics of a great platform. This session followed by the break-out sessions on 3 different tracks, Development, Architecture & Design and Enterprise at Scale. I have attended most of the sessions happening in the Scalable applications for Enterprises track as most of my application in this category. I did sneak into few topics of interest in other tracks as well.

On Day 2, Shankar Kalyana, DE&CTO, IBM India has spoken about the future of software development. Shankar has made it very interesting and did the talk without a powerpoint presentation (a welcome change :-)). He talked about the rapid pace at which the technology transitions are happening and the need for professional to embrace and adopt to the changes. I had an interesting after talk conversation with Shankar on the IBM Smart planet solution as well as innovation in general.

A common thread the different talks, sessions and speakers is the consensus on the latest happenings. It's certainly cloud computing, mobility and intelligent data processing (data analytics, business intelligence, BigData technologies etc..). Each of these are at different stages of the hype cycle but they are already changing the industry significantly.

I will share the detailed information on the sessions happened in the individual tracks in an upcoming post. Please do come back and check it out in couple of days.