Part of my role at SkyTouch is to help foster a culture that encourages focused innovation and continuous improvement. Developing a culture of innovation is not just one person in an ivory tower declaring how we will be innovative, saying, “Go forth and innovate.”
People don’t always know what it means to be innovative, so we have to encourage people to start thinking about their job in a different way, start being more creative within their day to day activities so that they can become more innovative in just the work that they’ve been assigned.
At SkyTouch, we focus on learning what innovation means, thinking outside the box, learning how to collaborate with other people, learning how to brainstorm, learning how to challenge the status quo, and building confidence in our employees to say, ‘Hey I’ve got a story to tell, and just cause I’m not a particular position where I’m asked my opinion on a daily basis, that doesn’t make my opinion any less valuable. It just makes it more difficult to be heard.’
So how can a company have a culture where people are encouraged and comfortable to contribute to the broader conversation that we’re having about what kind of products to develop and what markets to compete in? One aspect of the SkyTouch strategy toward innovation is called the Alpha Games.
This strategy is pretty common out in Silicon Valley; they call it Hackathons. But Hackathons are heavily focused on software development, and oftentimes it’s an individual practice. What we wanted to do was encourage collaboration, encourage company-wide involvement, and not limit our innovation to just software.
We started off generically calling it an Innovation Spike—a Spike is a Scrum term, an Agile software development term that suggests you stop, and rather than having your regular flow, you have a spike of activity focused around attacking a particular problem to help you understand it better. You can then use that information to estimate what it would take to get it done. But Innovation Spike just didn’t sound right for SkyTouch, so one of our creative services guys proposed the idea Alpha Games.
In the preparation toward our first Alpha Games, there were a lot of discussions about what we can do as a company to help advance the state of the art, how we can solve certain problems. Alpha is a beginning, a leader, an early test of something new, a measurement of risk, the brightest star in a constellation, and it sounds cool! We defined game: games have a goal, they have to end, they require teamwork…at least our kind of games do. They have some rules, and they’re supposed to be fun!
The Alpha Games is only a one day event. We don’t expect miracles. We just expect people to catch the bug, have some fun, see that this company is different, see that we want to be serious about fostering a culture of innovation and process improvement. This is just one forum for doing that. By itself it’s not going to do anything other than generate some fun one day a semester. But the thought behind the Alpha Games is we do them twice a year to build a momentum around this process of innovation, and then we can keep it going through recognizing achievement as part of the SkyTouch company culture.
Look out for the next post from SkyTouch Technology, Developing Focused Innovation, where we take a look at two projects from the most recent Alpha Games and how they’re inspiring SkyTouch to stay innovative!
