Creating a Culture of Innovation: Why 20% Time is not Enough

Google has garnered a lot of attention and some success with its "20% time" idea, which enables every engineer to spend one day a week working on projects that don't fit in their job description. In my observation, just announcing that every engineer is expected to spend a certain fraction of their time on innovative ideas won't magically lead to innovation. Plus, it's very hard to implement the 20% time model at a startup: most startups just don't have the luxury of 20% excess engineering capacity.

At my (startup) company Kosmix, we take a somewhat different approach to create a culture of innovation, which I described to Taylor Buley of Forbes in a recent video interview. I think the video is terrific, and encourage you to watch it (it's also embedded at the bottom of this post), but there's only so much that can be said in a 90-second video. So I collected together some of my thoughts into this blog post.

At Kosmix, we don't specify a set fraction of time for people to spend on new ideas. Instead, we have focused on creating a culture that engenders new ideas and rewards innovators, encouraging them to tackle new projects above and beyond their 100% contribution to mainline company execution. The three key building blocks that we've used to create a culture of innovation at Kosmix are Team, Environment, and Incentives.

Team. It always starts with the people. At Kosmix we are fortunate to have a team of rock-star Computer Science graduates from top universities; it's hard to throw a brick without hitting a PhD. Since CS skills are taken for granted, the interview process emphasizes creativity, problem-solving skills, and teamwork skills.

Very importantly, many Kosmixers are multi-dimensional people with interests and passions that extend well beyond work. For example, one of our Operations gurus has a deep interesting in (hold your breath) knitting, and runs knitting classes at work (they're called Knitting Knights). Our office manager also happens to teach Art History.

Environment. There's something about the graduate school environment that seems to bring out great ideas. Many of the great technology companies (e.g.,Yahoo and Google) have been created by graduate students. We have strived to maintain a grad school environment at Kosmix. Wall around and you'll hear plenty of heated hallway discussions and intellectual free for alls; nerf gun fights erupt over details of relevance algorithms.

When I was a grad student, I used to get ideas for whole new lines of research by attending talks by other students and faculty. The Infolab, the research group I was part of Stanford, has a tradition of Friday lunches where a student leads a discussion on their ongoing work. We have copied this model at Kosmix: every Friday, we have a communal lunch gathering, and a Kosmixer leads a discussion -- either on something cool they've been working on, or on some topic that's just cool but completely unrelated to Kosmix -- such as muscle cars, alternative fuels, or astronomy.

Incentives. Given the right environment, the next piece is incentives for people to go above and beyond the call of duty. At Kosmix the biggest reward is peer recognition through a system of awards:

• The Kosmix Kreed award is peer recognition at its purest. Any Kosmixer can nominate any other for doing something interesting and inventive that helps Kosmix users, or for going out of their way to help out another team or person on working on a different project. Giving this award is as easy as sending an email to HR, with a clear description of the achievement that merits the award.
  
• The Just Do It! award is given by management, and recognizes an individual who did a substantial project that goes above and beyond their job description. We stole this idea from Amazon.com, where some of us used to work. For example, one recent awardee dreamt up, designed, and implemented the feature that allows users to customize the Kosmix homepage, without any directive from management. Another implemented the ability to edit any topic page on Kosmix.

We also have other awards that recognize teams that execute really well on their core priorities. These awards are read out at monthly company meetings, to warm applause in front of the entire Kosmix team. Each award is also posted on the internal Kosmix blog, which is read by everyone at Kosmix. Awards carry nominal prizes, such as gift certificates; but the real prize is the peer recognition, which acts as a terrific incentive in a high-octane team.

One of the big successes of the Kosmix culture of innovation has been Meehive. A while back, a Kosmix developer thought it would be cool to take Kosmix's core categorization technology and apply it to the problem of filtering news and blogs. He worked on it for a bit to create a first version, which convinced management that this was important enough to create a full team around. We then staffed an official Kosmix project to create Meehive, a personalized newspaper, which we launched last month. You can specify your interests very easily (I have over 40, including technology and cricket), and Meehive scours thousands of newspapers and millions of blogs to create your own personalized newspaper. Early adopters love Meehive; I now use it as my main source of news every day. Check out what people are saying about Meehive on Twitter.

Oh, and by the way, the most recent Just Do It! Award went to a developer on the Meehive team who took it upon himself to create the Meehive iPhone app. It's now rising in popularity among News applications in the app store, and has been a bigger success than any of us imagined. Best of all, no told the developer to do it.

Comments

[Harold Jarche]

"Instead, we have focused on creating a culture that engenders new ideas and rewards innovators, encouraging them to tackle new projects above and beyond their 100% contribution to mainline company execution."

My understanding of that statement is that you don't give any company time for innovation, you just expect everyone to work overtime and not have a life outside work. Is that correct?

[Datawocky]

Harold: If you met the Kosmix team, you'd be keenly aware that most have a life outside work. I also say this explicitly in the Team section of the post.

Given a high-octane team, the right environment, and good understanding of company priorities, it's possible to get the mainline work of the company done and still have people innovate beyond that.

[O]

Hi,

Your title is indeed correct - 20% time is not enough. But at Google, thats not the only thing to foster innovation. Just to take the factors you mentioned:
Team - smart people all around
Environment - there is an emphasis on college-like atmosphere. I am fairly certain you have visited google campus.
Incentives - Google, too, has 'peer bonuses' and awards like 'EMG award' and 'Founder award'.

So I would rather sing a different tune - these things are not enough and you need something more (like 20% time, perhaps) to encourage innovation.

As company grows, so does 'middle management' and so do 'processes'. In such cases, people drift away from the core company values. 20% time proves valuable in such a scenario, since it gives someone a formal opportunity to get the mainline work done and get some time to work on own ideas, free from the hassle of management and processes.

[Harold Jarche]

@Datawocky That's what I hoped it would be like. I was just confused by the "100% to mainline company exec." - more than 100% in my mind means working beyond the norm. If everyone is happy, then that's great.

[Michael Christensen]

Have to agree 100%. Great post - keep up the good work. Thanks.

[Dunston rocks]

How do you account for people who may not be at their peak in grad school or even later, but might give their best well beyond the much-feted college / grad school years?

Also, the inherent assumption in your argument is that productivity level is a constant, which is a trap.

More importantly, the underlying argument is that somehow people with the same 'academic' /professional background are in 'the same place'. The whole premise of a grad school bringing out the best in people only seems to underline that the grad years were probably YOUR best years. Nothing more.

[Harry Fuecks]

At local.ch we had 20% time but the problem was no one ever used it, because of either self-induced or peer (not manager) pressure that made taking 20% time feel like pulling a sicky.

We later changed it to the notion of "hackdays" where the whole engineering team works on anything they like.

During hackdays, managers and the business are not allowed to intrude - the only valid reason to interrupt is if the live site is down. And peer pressure flows in a different direction - working on your "normal" work is frowned upon, as it undermines for everyone.

The only guideline on *what* you do is you have to deliver a lightning talk at the end - i.e. if you wrote an ant simulator, you'll have to explain that to your colleagues.

What gets done in practice is stuff like prototypes, trying out stuff like Open Source projects or online APIs or learning something new.

We do this 2 days every two months, which of course doesn't add up to 20% time but is at a level every can accept.

[88 India]

Its good, to have innovations in your company, as they can pave way for a new products or functionality in your existing products....but making your employees to do over time for that innovation is a bad idea, they must come from their heart which is the base for innovations...

[Jo Jordan]

The whole ethos of a research environment is that everyone is working on their own project. There are overlaps and a common project called teaching but the drive comes from each person.

The 'top' is there to provide the environment where this drive is nurtured and supported. Included in this is managing the meeting structure where we discuss the courses we offer - the interface between the unfolding world of ideas and the world of noobes.

Like the first comment, I was pretty turned off by your description which is sad as I thought your product was good. But using a product produced under duress is a little bit like drinking tea grown on a badly run plantation . . the bottom line is that tea drinker suddenly becomes unnecessary

[Datawocky]

@Jo Jordan: I'm not sure what turned you off, or how you got the impression of duress. Also, not sure of where the teaching and research come in. I do teach at Stanford, but Kosmix is not a university but a company.

The biggest point I'm making is that a startup like Kosmix needs to have a straight line direction as well as a vision and environment that encourage employees to innovate beyond the straight line. Innovation cannot be mandated by management, but they can create the right environment for it.

[nataly]

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[margaret]

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