You would be hard pressed to find a tech company that doesn’t lay claim to the title of innovator. For some innovation is their “life blood.” For others it’s their “passion” or “tradition.” It’s in their “DNA” or it’s their “mindset.”
“Innovation is the buzzword. In fact, it has been the buzzword for so long, you could say we’ve developed a cult around it,” said author, educator and “chief reinvention officer” Nadya Zhexembayeva in a Harvard Business Review article.
What’s so wrong with working toward a common goal of constant improvement? According to Zhexembayeva, negativity surfaced in the form of adverse employee reaction to the concept of innovation — or at least the word. Your C-suite might love the connotations, but if the culture is not in place, innovation can conjure thoughts of long hours spent on infelicitous experiments and reprisals for seemingly unavoidable failures.
What does it mean, then, to have a culture that truly embraces innovation? For Andrew Farnum, CEO at Variant Bio, to embrace innovation is to embrace failure — to celebrate mistakes as learning experiences and assuage fear of repercussions.
“In practice, we try to recognize our failures just as much as our successes and call out what we have learned to highlight the positive impact they can have on our work,” said Farnum. “If we minimize our failures or simply sweep them under the rug, we are not doing our job and showing the team that we recognize the importance of allowing for failure so long as it fosters an innovative culture.”
Built In Seattle reached out to three local tech leaders to find out how the true spirit of innovation –– not just the buzzword –– is propelling their companies forward.
Through intelligent content management, training, contextual guidance, customer engagement and actionable analytics, Highspot’s sales enablement platform gives companies the opportunity to improve the performance of sales teams.
What are some signs that a company actually has a culture of innovation?
We have a tenet on our product team: “Great ideas come from anywhere.” All people – regardless of role, title, team or background – can solve complex problems with creative solutions. When our team members are freely sharing ideas, knowing their voices are heard and valued, that’s when we know we’re successfully fostering a culture of innovation.
Team members become more engaged when they see themselves as creators of the product instead of a cog in the machine of someone else’s vision. When employees get to help shape, question and drive that vision, it builds a sense of ownership that positively manifests in the product. People also need the right tools to maximize their potential and excel. We are investing in infrastructure automation as well as advanced metrics logging and experimentation platforms to enable our team to innovate and experiment easier, safer and faster.
All people – regardless of role, title, team or background – can solve complex problems with creative solutions.”
How do you make space for new ideas and innovative ways of doing business?
Every product person knows what it feels like to be heads down on features that need to get out the door. This reality leaves little room to take a deep breath, look around and try something new that may or may not turn out. Even if an idea never makes it into the product, there is always value in trying new approaches and technologies because of what is learned along the way.
As a leader, it’s important for me to support our teams in prioritizing innovation and balancing what needs to get done with the endless possibilities of what we could explore. Highspot intentionally makes space to innovate – from regular hackathons to dedicated time in between releases to explore areas of passion. We also ensure our people have the visibility to showcase their creations. This year, Highspot’s three company founders were part of our hackathon judging panel, deciding which ideas would be pulled into the roadmap.
It’s one thing to play around in a sandbox, and another to see your idea come to life in the hands of a customer.
What are some of the challenges Highspot has faced in developing and maintaining this type of culture, particularly as you’ve grown?
I believe there should always be a balance between investing in innovation versus investing in propelling the business as quickly as we possibly can. Our team constantly reminds ourselves that innovation moves us forward in different ways than purely focusing on company strategy and planned features. It’s easy to get so laser-focused on what you need to do to compete – to reach the next milestone – that you end up locked into a mindset of delivering without thinking through what you’re delivering and why. Stepping back to see the big picture and giving your team space to experiment often results in a more well-rounded product that better serves your customers in the long term.
Our Highspot team believes in and holds ourselves accountable for creating space to innovate, as innovation is core to our identity and an unwavering commitment for us all.
Variant Bio’s mission is to identify populations with exceptional health-related traits, use sequencing and analytic approaches to identify genes and pathways linked to these traits and use this information to discover new therapeutics.
What are some signs that a company actually has a culture of innovation?
Creating a culture of innovation means not only allowing for but also embracing failure. The fear of failure is a natural human reaction, but if people are afraid of the repercussions of failure, they won’t feel the freedom required to innovate and try new things. Some of the greatest lessons a company can learn come from failures. What matters most is how you respond to them and ensure they are not repeated.
Some of the greatest lessons a company can learn come from failures.”
How do you make space for new ideas and innovative ways of doing business?
If something isn’t working, we aren’t afraid to acknowledge that and shift our approach. Oftentimes, if you sink weeks, months or even years into a project or an idea, it is easy to keep pushing the status quo forward even if it’s not the right thing to do. Taking a step back – or three steps – can be an incredibly valuable exercise when evaluating if it makes sense to continue to invest time and resources into something. If we ask the team to push things forward that clearly don’t make sense, that can stifle innovation like nothing else. We value each other’s time too much to do that.
What are some of the challenges Variant Bio has faced in developing or maintaining this type of culture, particularly as you’ve grown?
A critical component of fostering innovation as a small business is to remain flexible and have the ability to adjust strategy when needed. However, as companies grow it becomes necessary to work in processes and procedures that have the potential to limit flexibility. We try our best to not overcomplicate things and always check ourselves to understand the why and not just the how of what we do. If the how starts to take precedence over the why, we reevaluate.
No matter how fast we grow, we always encourage new employees who join the company to challenge established ideas and processes. Their fresh perspective can help us to determine if what we are doing is necessary and beneficial or if it’s something that has become such a habit that people are hesitant to disrupt it. Constructive disruption, similar to failure, can open the door to a level of innovation that is required to succeed as a small business.
Esper offers a DevOps SaaS platform for dedicated devices. The company’s device infrastructure enables developers, mid-market organizations and enterprise fleets of more than 100,000 devices to deliver their software as a service.
What are some signs that a company actually has a culture of innovation?
Innovation is ingrained in each team members’ psyche as well as practices. Continual, incremental, bite-sized innovation is encouraged and fostered. Budget and time is set aside for innovative events and practices. And innovative ideas are rewarded and, ultimately, allowed to show up in the product.
And innovative ideas are rewarded and, ultimately, allowed to show up in the product.”
How do you make space for new ideas and innovative ways of doing business?
We actively set time aside for research, thinking and ideating. Esper also visibly invests in new ideas and rewards innovative thinkers.
Regular work and delivery pressures constantly take away from innovation. Dedicating resources and time to innovation helps mitigate this. Also, an openly stated policy that innovation will be encouraged and people will be given time in their regular routine to innovate goes a long way.
