InfoQ Homepage Innovation Content on InfoQ
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How to Foster Startup-Like Innovation in Established Companies
Startup founders expect uncertainty and failure as part of their innovation process. Leaders in established companies need to make sure that people take on risks to build the next big thing. Adding small improvements to products in a constant manner will create a compounding effect over time, and will help you build the exact thing your users are looking for.
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How Organisational Culture and Psychological Safety Fosters Our Creativity
Organisations need to create the right conditions and culture for creativity to flourish so as to stay relevant, compete and thrive for the future. An addiction to burnout and fixation on productivity can stifle creativity. What’s needed is psychological safety, inclusion, experimentation, growth mindsets and allowing thinking time.
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Building an Intentional Organisation: a Holistic Approach
Building an intentional organisation requires a mindset that considers all organisational building blocks holistically. Leadership is key; actions that managers take have organisational consequences which need to be aligned to design an organisation that can achieve its purpose.
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How to Scale Pilots into a Global IT Organization
Scaling pilots into a global IT organization is doable, and if done right, it really works and can help to transform entire companies, said Clemens Utschig. At DevOpsCon Munich 2019 he presented how they go from starting with an idea to scaling it up into the global organization.
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How to Remain Agile While Scaling
Managing the complexity and scale of both the business and the software were key challenges as Yext started to grow, said Sean MacIsaac at Agile Business Day 2019. Yext addresses this by having product solutions that are broadly applicable and configurable by their customer team, and by hiding complexity with independently deployable services with clearly defined interfaces.
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How to be Creative and Remain Focused in the Digital Distraction Era
The way we use digital devices has a strong impact on our cognitive skills. The main skills impacted are creativity and focus; both are very much needed in future jobs and they are very much influenced by our digital habits, said Monica Bormetti. She spoke about focus and creativity in the digital distraction era at Agile Business Day 2019.
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Lessons Learned from Innovating at Google: Frame the Problem, Use Data, and Define the MVP
The truly great, innovative, useful ideas come mostly from two sources: your target users, and people working in the organization - not necessarily those with a "product manager" hat. Experimentation can help us to materialize ideas into actual products and technology. Framing the problem, using data, and defining the MVP can help us to increase the chance of success in innovation.
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The Importance of Leadership and Management in Hypergrowth
At QCon New York 2019, Patrick Kua shared lessons learned sowing the seeds and fertilising an environment to cultivate high performing teams in a startup fintech company. This article explores how to manage technical managers in a fast growing company.
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Autonomy and Accountability: Randy Shoup’s Advice for Moving Fast at Scale
Randy Shoup, VP of engineering at WeWork, presented "Moving Fast at Scale" at CraftCon 2019, and discussed how he has organized teams for speed at scale without sacrificing innovation, business value, quality or team autonomy.
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Why and How Etsy Embraces Differences at the Workplace
Etsy has deployed various tactics to drive diversity and greater inclusion. They recently included diversity and inclusion in their guiding principles, integrated inclusion at each step of their employees' lifecycle, and developed strategies not just to hire diversity, but to foster a culture of inclusion. They empowered their employee resource groups to lead change based on feedback.
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How ThoughtWorks Applied User Centered Design to Drive Digital Transformations
At Agile India 2019, ThoughtWorks presented how design thinking enabled various industries to disrupt their technology and their business model. Product and technology teams need to interact differently and develop new customer centric skills. Based on how user centricity is changing business models and organizations, ThoughtWorks proposed a new version of the Agile Manifesto.
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Experimenting with #NoProductOwner at F-Secure
Maaret Pyhäjärvi experimented with no product owner and reported the benefits on team performance. The team developed a cross-team ownership that increased their ability to solve problems, they improved the flow of value, delivered solutions faster, and drove innovation as they anticipated features that were not expected by the business. they introduced data driven feedback mechanism.
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Applying Artificial Intelligence in the Agile World
The convergence of artificial intelligence (AI) systems with the agile world is having a disruptive effect on how we build software and the types of products that we build, said Aidan Casey. By combining machine learning and deep learning we can build applications that truly learn like humans. AI bias is a very serious concern, as AI systems are only as good as the data sets used to train them.
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The Risk of Climate Change and What Tech Can Do: QCon London Q&A
Data centres create more emissions than the aviation industry due to energy usage and 24x7 availability, and the growth of the cloud computing and mining of cryptocurrencies is increasing the impact technology has on our climate. Moving existing servers to providers who use renewable sources of electricity could lead to planet-wide climate improvements. A QCon Q&A with Jason Box and Paul Johnston.
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Capital One Banks on Open Source to Scale Innovation
In 2012, Capital One was 100% Waterfall, had manual processes and out-sourced their commercial technology. In six years, the bank realized their DevOps transformation supported by their open source adoption. They established a rigorous open source strategy that enabled them to transform their technology and innovation DNA.