On Innovation in big companies

These notes are from BarcampPhilly ’08 that were lost in the depths of my computer’s hard disk and I only just found again. At the event, a few of us from CIM held a round table discussion on innovation, especially developer led innovation in big companies. Here are the points that people mentioned:

• Innovation only comes from free cycles, even the best ideas need time to be thought through
• Leverage something thats existing rather than a brand new idea
• Agile development can actually hurt innovation with too much transparency. Its hard to justify something that you may feel has a long term win
• Technical managers should whet the ideas of their team members
• Innovation comes from bottom almost never from top
• Innovation = Risk
• True story: At AOL, the AOL IM service was declared a risk
• Constraints actually push innovation
• Innovation wont happen without proper incentives/rewards.
• How about cross team innovation. How do designers/developers collaborate to innovate?

So this has only taken almost a year to put up, with BarcampPhilly ’09 coming up soon. Since then there has been a few opportunities within CIM to push bottom-up innovation, including a labweek for all of engineering.

Author: Arpit Mathur

Arpit Mathur is a Principal Engineer at Comcast Labs where he is currently working on a variety of topics including Machine Learning, Affective Computing, and Blockchain applications. Arpit has also worked extensively on Android and iOS applications, Virtual Reality apps as well as with web technologies like JavaScript, HTML and Ruby on Rails. He also spent a couple of years in the User Experience team as a Creative Technologist. View all posts by Arpit Mathur