Monkeynotions

The other day I hired a contractor who happened to be a phD from Berkeley. He’s an awesome designer and bringing in such new ideas. I found myself in a new position … While he was asking “why not?” I was passing on the pushback given to me tacitly, explicitly, or personally. I had just turned into a character from Dilbert.

It’s been making me incredibly sad because at one point I was like him when I first arrived at AOL. 2 years later, I’ve been through re-orgs, product cancellations, product direction shifts. I have been so used to being beholden to timelines, legacy technical issues, and trying to convince a committee of people (that continuously change) of designs; oftentimes, it prevents me from asking the most important question in innovation:

why not?

As a result we often look to other products and industry for ideas to get things done and *follow industry standard*. While that is great and I fully encourage awareness and participation in the industry, it could train you to only think about things in one way. Where what school has taught me is to “think for yourself” and above else do not plagiarize. While work teaches you to “be efficient” and “use templates” (lite forms of plagiarizing).

I was thinking what can big companies do to increase innovation? Here are some ideas that I’ve come up with:

*Have a Masters/PhD rotation program. I would not recommend undergrad interns as they are so eager to please and not as confident in what they have learned that they will probably not push their ideas as much. Also their younger age may threaten those in the organization. (It’s been great working with this pHD student, as not only does he bring in fresh ideas; he has no burnout to not fight for what is *right*. Also he will view this more as an internship since he is getting his pHD.)

Update: I’ve gotten feedback about this and the focus on academia. I do not mean to NOT hire folks who aren’t degreed or who are undergraduates. I am just saying make a special rotation for folks with an advanced degree where their goal is to specialize and go deep into problems. Now that being said, there is a large reliance on personality and the individual to take initiative in the right way. If there isnt’ a personality match or personal initiative, it’s useless to bring them in regardless of how many degrees they have.

*Freedom–Associate your company with a school where employees can take a semester to immerse themselves in the academic environment with pay.

*Reward Initiative not success — Yes, very grade school-ish, but I’m thinking “A for Effort”. You reward the fact that people step up not necessarily the result. This will help people to do the very first step in innovation: TRY.

*Internal Rotation Program — Sometimes a different view on the same project or at the work place would help out.

*Internal Startup Program — Affiliation with smaller properties within the company and rotate folks out so they can get a startup feel.

*Attend a conference, meetup, event once a month — Meeting new people and learning about something outside of your cube will help in seeing the same problem differently (suggested by Jeremiah, thanks!)

I’m sure there are more…feel free to leave comments to discuss.
Please know that this is not a knock on AOL, but rather I’m sure ALL big companies have this.

Technorati Tags: aol, innovation

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 27th, 2006 at 8:11 am and is filed under aol. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.