Reveal our ‘Innovator Gene’ – Adopting the Ways of Lean

With a Lean Startup orientation, we find that much of the software creation going on at our organization these days has moved to Agile, or is on the journey there. Now release cycles are rapid (mini releases), and as we push out minimal marketable features we’re more focused on the ‘user story’ behind the functionality. From our earlier monolithic R&D establishment, we’re grouping around smaller, discrete Startup type team-sets. Each one is a kind of self-contained entity (includes Product Management, R&D and QA) and is focused on a reduced wedge of our release “pie”.

And running in the background is the growing trend here to adopt the tools of innovation. Today, these include “ideation” and systematic inventive thinking (SIT) that push for individual initiative and crowd-sourced ideas. We’d like everyone to paint a “picture of the future”, to imagine where the world is going in the next five years and what we need to do to get there.

As employees, we’re encouraged to stay in a continuous learning mode, drawing knowledge from sources such as academy, industry sites and the experience of other companies. All this to help us maintain a disruptive, lean culture and keep improving our own capabilities. Our goal nowadays is to challenge our own processesand be ready to reinvent our ideas and products.

And the once and future Hackathon represents an important stepping stone in this process. We’re in the middle of a transformation to even more innovation, creative collaborations and technology leadership.