The first session of our Innovation Hours project happened on Friday last week and overall it was a great success. For our Helpdesk guy Ryan, it didn't go so well because he was attending to urgent user issues for nearly the entire time. The remaining members of the team got some good work done though, creating some new neurone connection paths and stretching their talents a little. It's going to be a few weeks before we will start seeing any results from this project but I feel we've made a positive start. My measure for that was that there was a real buzz around our office both a couple of hours before and during the project time.

One of the key issues I found in researching "20% Time" was that there was very little information out on the internet regarding the actual organisation of this type of system. It fell to myself and Curwoods Managing Partner Scott Kennedy to draft, discuss and agree a framework around this project that could meet the following goals:

1.       Stimulate innovation amongst the IT Team in the use of our current infrastructure and software platforms to improve our client service delivery.

2.       Ensure that the time being devoted to the project isn't just being wasted (eg watching lots of interesting YouTube clips or building a Facebook competitor coded in LISP).

In next week's post I'll elaborate on the details of the framework we developed. Till then, happy innovating!