I see really cool projects being driven by the giants’ technologies companies, resulting in an innovative product, and I wonder: How do they do that? How they stimulate their employees to be so creative?
I never worked for some of those companies, but I worked for quite big ones, in successful startups, small startups… And I’ve been so bored in the past few years. All companies, all products, they look like just more of the same for me.
Someone had a great idea and founds a startup. Great opportunity to innovate, right? Not really. Once the development of the product for this startup begins, everyone is looking at what people are using, how the possible competitors are doing it and the path is driven to a safe monetized one.
Yeah, I know. The main purpose of a business is to make money. But can’t we find a good balance between innovation and finance success? I can give one simple example I had to deal with in a new startup, new product. Then we are adding more features to the product, and I need to ask the UX team to help to design a new interface. In a meeting with the UX team, I explain the problem we are trying to solve, the technical solution that the developers adopted and they say they will work on a suggestion for the interface. Once they come back with the result, the first thing they do is open a famous e-commerce website and saying that they suggest doing like that because everybody is using the same approach. WHY?
Why people are being so resistant to innovating? Are we missing some stimulation at university courses to teach people how to think outside the box? Or is it a corporative thing that people avoid innovation to secure their jobs?
Now you expect me to give you the answers, right? Sorry, but I am still working on that. 🙂
With the technical team it has been the same: “let’s adopt that solution because it is easier or faster.” I work with a lot of finance-related products, and even business-wise is the same: “let’s adopt the old school solution because we already know that it works well.”
I have been doing my part, researching how to stimulate the team to have outstanding ideas, trying different ways to do market research with clients. So far, I didn’t have any success, even because there is a big blocking wall of finance success goal only always ahead.