How I involve employees with innovation

IT firm Odecee made it big early, after locking down a $1 million contract with a major bank after it turned one. Since then it has continued to grow strongly, reaching revenue of $10 million in the past year.

Founders Michael Bodle, Oscar Huseyin and Con Mouzouris attribute a lot of their success to the “innovation machine” – a process by which all employees contribute new ideas and develop them into products. Huseyin says other SMEs should explore how to include a similar process in their own business.

So how’s the business travelling?

It’s business as usual. We’re continuing to grow through the business plan we mapped out, getting new customers and winning some new work. We’ve been working on some new products.

It tends to get quiet this time of year, tends to wind down. But I like being busy – busy is good for any business.

Can you give some background to Odecee’s innovation teams? How did they come about?

When you look at where we came from, we’re a technology organisation that has a unique way of doing certain things in areas like software development. So for a long time we’ve been a long-standing team that has been able to shape a compelling offering together, and through that, we’ve been able to innovate, cut costs, and approach our customers’ problems in different way.

This led to a lot of success in the early days. But we’ve evolved, gotten larger, and so that’s an aspect of our business that we want to continue to build upon.

So how do you approach that now?

We needed to think about what this means, and how the process we’ve used can help shape the technologies we’re going to be investing in and bringing to our customers. What we really want to do is take the noise out of it all, and bring to the customers a top 10 of our products that we really love the most.

It’s that strategy that we think will set us apart as experts in emerging technology.

Is that where the “Innovation Machine” comes from?

What happened around that was, we had a think about how we could harness our broader time to work with our innovation, and that’s where we came up with the idea of an “innovation machine”.

That whole concept of innovation is built around our software, so we’ve built our business on being able to learn around that innovation, and get participation through the rest of the organisation. We want to harvest that knowledge.

So how does it work?

There’s three parts to the innovation machine. The first is ideas generation.

Using this, we want to get the appropriate individuals together to solicit solutions that they may have. It could have been stuff they’ve been learning on the side, or whatever else, and stuff they’ve been learning while on site with customers.

That’s the first part. And that happens in a couple of different ways. We have workshops, and with myself and the heads of innovation, we tour customer sites, speak with our people, and target initial projects and go out from there.

So we start gathering ideas about what we’re happy about, what we’re not happy about, and where we think there’s room for improvement.

Where does it go from there?

Then it comes to internal meetings. Once a month, we offer everything up to the team. The whole team knows about these workshops, and it’s mediated. We get a varied turnout from the team, we get a lot of people who are interested, and we play through these role-playing scenarios to come up with new products and solutions.

How often does this happen?

Usually every month. We have a workshop where we work through each one of our leads on a project, and they work through some emerging technology they’ve researched.

One month someone will take a turn talking about technology, leading a discussion about it and how it can be integrated with our solutions.

What’s the second part?

After that, we have an ideas register. That’s where we put all the ideas, and the whole team gets to vote on those ideas. So we’ve actually built an application out of that, and if the idea is really good, we’ll work on it.

We also have FedEx days, which is an idea we got from another technology business, Atlassian. If the idea is good, and it gets through, you get two days, and you deliver a prototype for the app out of those two days. And then every quarter, we meet, and the team that built it gets to present back to us.

What type of ideas have you gotten out of this? Major projects?

We’ve got some great ideas out of it. We’ve got a product called Velocity that was made through this process. It just gives the team a chance to come together and create something.

How many employees do you have now? Do they all take part?

It’s 75 now, getting up to 80.

It’s optional. The majority of us are consultants and we’re at external sites. Obviously the customers have the top priority when it comes to work time, but most of our staff are very interested. Anywhere from 15% to 20% work on the FedEx days.

Is this an approach you’d recommend for other businesses?

The benefits are huge from an innovation perspective. The benefit is for the entire team, and it creates a great sense of community. Builds up a culture, and it builds up the team spirit.