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Nurturing Incubations

  • 아티클

One of the things that I think about often is how do I cultivate a culture in my team that encourages, empowers and rewards/recognizes incubation efforts. Any technology innovation in its infancy, or early stage R&D work for something that is not necessarily well-defined is what I loosely call an incubation. It is not always the case that incubation efforts are long-lead innovations. Sometimes, they can be a quick turn of the dial.

I personally do not believe that everyone has the right mindset, passion, discipline and capability to be involved in incubation all the time, context switching from day to day business goals. Having the right people involved in the incubation, giving them the right environment so that the ideas can be nurtured and not placing undue constraints on the team are all critical factors to provide a nurturing environment.

As a development organization, it is important to make sure that a portion of the team’s bandwidth is allocated for incubation or “long-lead” innovation which we expect to take to market in a subsequent product cycle. This means that a business has to plan resource allocation in the following 3 buckets

· Making current customers successful (servicing)

· Working on the next version of the product

· Incubation

Resourcing incubation has to be a part of planning – otherwise the natural tendency is to suck up all the resources for the critical activity of the day.

There have been a lot of successful incubations in Developer Division and I will also be the first to tell you that there have been some that haven’t been successful. The nature of incubations is that. If somebody tells me they have a 100% success rate in incubations, then I say they are not doing enough incubations.

Other business leaders and companies have different philosophies on how to model incubations. This is simply what I have found to be most effective for my organization. However, innovation and agility need to go hand-in-hand and having a culture of encouraging and empowering people to do incubations is a “must” for continuous, ongoing innovation for any business.

Namaste!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    Where do you slate Popfly?

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    PingBack from http://msdnrss.thecoderblogs.com/2008/01/22/nurturing-incubations/

  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2008
    Hi Robert, When we started work on Popfly more than a year ago, it was absolutely an incubation that we wanted to do to help people build experiences on the web easily. -somasegar

  • Anonymous
    January 24, 2008
    This is the most boring blog I have ever seen.

  • Anonymous
    January 25, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 26, 2008
    You know you guy at MSFT really careless about your customers. Do you have idea how many people spent thousands of dollars to learn VB6 and FoxPro or the companies that trained their IT staff on these tools. More importantly small and medium size companies AND vertical market businesses that run VB and FoxPro applications that, despite MSFT claims, are basically stuck on Windows XP. (Which is not a bad thing given what a terrible OS vista is) ....   You kicked both developer communities and their clients to the curb forcing us into Visual studio with no clear migration path.... The ironic part is Visual studio is a mess of a product that defines the term bloat ware!  But you have time to worry about stuff like popfly .... I really which you would get in touch with what is going on in the field instead of just listening to the MSFT cheerleadering squad and your large corporate accounts.

  • Anonymous
    October 23, 2008
    I have blogged in the past on my views around innovation , and the effort that needs to go into such

  • Anonymous
    October 27, 2008
    Publicación del inglés original : Jueves, 23 de octubre de 2008 14:43 PST por Somasegar Anteriormente