Tenet of Innovation #9: Give your people the time and resources they need

In 1967, Charles Hummel wrote the classic essay “Tyranny of the Urgent,” which spoke to the hearts and minds of many of us caught up in the rush of the modern world. Far from creating the 1950s ideal of a life freed from trivial tasks, technology has simply caused us to pick up the pace. The pressures of increased global competition and the demands of Wall Street have done the same to every manager in industry. Our engineering managers are now expected to reduce cycle times, deliver higher output with the same or fewer product development resources, make accurate predictions, and create breakthrough inventions, all at the same time. Faced with this seemingly intractable problem, engineering managers naturally pass this pressure on to the individual contributors, which creates the assumption that we only have time to work on sure things, increasing the probability that our new products will make only incremental improvements over current offerings.

To get a high degree of innovation, it’s essential to allow for risk and to give our people the time and resources to take those risks. I will refer again to Dan Pink, author of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (Riverhead, 2009), as he describes various companies, including Google, that allocate up to 20 percent of their staff members’ time to work on projects of their own choosing and demonstrates that this can produce a surprising return for the firm. In fact, the list of innovative products and services created through this “20 percent time” (or variations at other companies such as Atlassian’s “FedEx Days”) is pretty impressive. According to Alec Proudfoot, engineering manager at Google, “Just about all the good ideas here at Google have bubbled up from 20 percent time, or something like 20 percent time, where people have their own idea and run with it.” (Google’s 20 Percent Factor) For example, these ideas have resulted in Google News and Gmail for Google.

Although this is a great concept, it can be difficult to justify for some companies, given the pressures under which engineering managers operate. Instead, a more nuanced approach might be to scale this effort by the percentage of revenue to be devoted to new products. This investment level is a reasonable proxy for the level of innovation your industry demands. For example, if your firm devotes 10 percent of revenue to new product development, start by allocating 5 percent of your product development resources to have as their primary role working on longer-range, “non-roadmap” projects—that is, to projects that are not yet part of your agreed-upon standard commercialization process. These will frequently be for development of technology blocks for future needs. In addition, all resources should have some percentage of their time given to non-roadmap projects. Begin by allocating 5 percent of the time for all personnel to non-roadmap items of their own choosing. (One way we do this at Keithley Instruments is through the creation of voluntary “technology forums” for engineers from similar disciplines. Although these forums have a management sponsor, they are run by engineers, have a budget, and set their own agendas.) To constrain this and get the greatest benefit for the firm, consider setting aside a few hours per week when all staffers are expected to work in self-selected teams and produce a report of their work for the management team.

The tenets of creating an innovative environment discussed in this blog will have much greater impact if management allocates the time and resources necessary, providing some separation from the significant pressures of rapid commercialization.