Driving Experimentation and Innovation - The Value of a Bottom-Up Approach

Our team, consisting of 145 staff, knows that as a broad definition, experimentation is a pre-condition for innovation, but also that it is not the same thing. Just trying things out is not innovating. Yet we need to continue to support and promote experimentation time and activities, both formally through Hackathons and Innovation Labs, as well as informally by discussions within the team.

Both are a catalyst for innovation.

In our case, our teams know that experimentation plus innovation needs to make a significant contribution to one or more of the following four questions:

Does it grows audience or extend our reach?

Does it grow revenue?

Does it reduces costs or provide other efficiencies?

Does it improve engineering productivity?

To put both experimentation and innovation into practice earlier this year we held our first run at an Innovation Lab, which was considered a major success. Many great ideas were brought to the surface, and three of the four winning ideas are now being actively being pursued within the business.

Our Innovation Lab process begins with a media release – we challenged the team to fit their idea on to one page, presenting as if we were launching the solution. I don’t mind saying we lifted this idea from a large, technology-focused company.

As a leadership group we then chose the ideas that we thought had the best chance of success, best fitted our strategic objectives, and met our definition and measure of innovation. From here, the teams expanded on their ideas in a 10-minute presentation to a group of executives. It was then the business whom challenged the ideas and decided where we should invest our time and resources.

The official winner was Cloud Nine – the use of AWS lambda to reduce our deployment time, and decrease operational costs. Lamda is referred to as server less compute, and enables us to dynamically allocate CPU and reduce the size and count of EC2 instances. Cloud Nine, coupled with our innovative modularisation of reusable Node.JS components, has had a major impact on delivery times and our responsiveness to rapidly changing business requirements.

We have many examples of such success. We had one of our devs implement server-side dynamic ad insertion for live content in 24 hours at our most recent Hackathon – sales were chasing us the next day for to deliver into prod. We’ve built both versions of our Native News App on a single code base, one using Xamarin, and the latest version in React Native. Both decisions were driven by our devs, and reduced development and maintenance time dramatically.

Our infra team is currently experimenting to drive down archive storage requirements with dedupe technologies and a centralized object store. We have recently gone to market with an automated trading platform for TV sales – architected in-house, drawing upon best of breed and internally developed products to put give our sales team to sell more and administer less.

Aside from the competitive advantage that experimentation has the potential to provide, most importantly it keeps our team engaged. It is critical in technology to attract and retain the best talent – they want the big challenges, they want to solve problems, and they want to have a say.

Innovation and experimentation are important for business due to a number of factors: the industry we work in, the competitive set that is ever increasing, and the globalization of our market.

With a growing number of competitors, the challenge for “legacy” businesses is to transform rapidly and ingrain a culture of experiment in order to enable innovation and make it possible to compete in a rapidly changing world.