It can be exhausting trying to keep up with market trends, particularly driving new features or improvements, using traditional business driven practices. Customers demand products that are evolving at a quick pace or they get bored and may move on to a competitor's product. The goal today is to deploy new features, fixes, and improvements as quick as possible in order to keep up with customer expectations.

As agile methodologies and good DevOps practices create a foundation to quickly develop and release products many companies are realizing that they need to increase the pool of ideas to keep up with the pace. Several Agile LEAN frameworks are designed incorporate a sprint of innovation and planning such as the SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework) where every 6th sprint is exactly that.

The point is that you need to utilize the talent you already have within your organization, your product development teams, by creating a culture of innovation. Let's look at a few examples of companies that lead the pack for innovation practices such as Apple, Google, and Netflix.

Apple has been at the top of the list for companies that are the most innovative for many years running. They attract amazing talent because people genuinely want to work on their products. They encourage everyone to contribute new ideas and have no limits on how they invest in innovation. Good talent is attracted to Apple rather than Apple seeking out the talent.

For a long time Google had 20% time, where 20% of working hours from each employee are expected to be applied to innovative ideas that may benefit google.

Netflix has a culture of fully trusting employees to do what is right for the company even going as far as not having required hours of operation or PTO policies. They focus on hiring the right people and trusting them to do what is necessary. There is room to experiment and makes mistakes without repercussions.

Smaller companies and organizations who are just starting to cultivate an innovation mindset find it hard to implement strategies similar to these behemoth size organizations who have enough staff to cover regular operations while letting them innovate part time.

There are other less intrusive ways to start building a culture of innovation, one of which is holding an innovation event or hack-a-thon with your associates.

Get started by first establishing a definition for Innovation in your organization, emphasizing that innovation does not always mean creating something new, but rather it is about creating new value.

Service-based architecture patterns such as microservices enable applications and functionality to be mixed and mashed in ways that would have been difficult as recent as 5 yrs ago. Your development teams know how your applications are put together and what service APIs are available.

Encourage your team to think about the services and applications that they have created and how they might be able to leverage services from different products to create new value. You will be surprised at the ideas that the team(s) will produce about how those services might mix and match to create new value.

Attracting good talent for your organization is challenging and keeping up with customer expectations will quickly exhaust your ideas. Offering opportunities for innovation and continuous learning are ever more important to set your company apart from others. Get started planning your own innovation event today !!!