Google had the “20% Time Project”, which was an initiative to encourage people to innovate unsupervised. According to a page in Wikipedia (found using Perplexity.ai, as most of my research these days), this resulted in things like AdSense and Google News. The Wikipedia entry and other research shows that it had its issues, too. Few people did any percent, and some called it the “120% Project” because the work happened beyond the regular work day.
Official or not, many companies have some type of program like this, and I’ve worked at a few where they were both formal and informal. The formal ones have some type of financial incentive to them, and the informal ones are generally a good way to accelerate career growth. There are many ways to measure the success of such programs. Increases in employee engagement; broadening of skills (which increases organizational capabilities); competitive edge as better (or even disruptive) innovations evolve; the attraction talented new employees; and things people haven’t even thought of yet because of the nature of the topic.
The innovations that pay off go through some stages that are similar to regular old projects. There is the discomfort stage, where something is identified as bothersome at some level and wouldn’t it be great if something were done about that. There is the ideation phase, where someone thinks that they have a way to make it less bothersome (or more cool, which is a legitimate bypass of the discomfort stage). There is the experimental stage where various things are tried to fix the problem or improve the solution (or sometimes both). Then there is the demonstration stage, where someone shows others (sometimes a someone from an earlier stage) what the experiments have yielded. The demonstration and experimental stages may iterate for a while, until either the commitment or abandonment stage occurs. Those last two are not only similar to regular old projects, they are the start of regular old projects.
One interesting thing about the stages of an innovation is that the “someone” at each stage may or may not be the same someone. There are solopreneurs where they are the someone from start to finish, or at least starting at the experimental stage. Which final stage comes in to play has lots of different influences. Some innovations are clearly awesome from the start, while others seem great in isolation but have impractical issues during or after the ideation stage. Others can be killed by skipping or re-ordering stages. As mentioned, some stage can be skipped because they may not be necessary (though I believe the discomfort stage always occurs and is just not always recognized as such). The biggest problem can occur in re-ordering the stages, especially moving that commitment stage anywhere earlier. It is usually helpful to set a time frame for the demonstration stages. Having an expectation around when the demonstration will be provides the urgency that is sometimes necessary to shift from motivation to action. Gathering estimates and milestones before that first demo is a good way to influence the lifecycle to ending in abandonment. It takes away the sense of ownership, playfulness, and excitement and turns it into a job too soon.
This problem has been observed in several psychological studies, none of which I had the foresight to take note of when I heard of them but Perplexity did manage to find a decent article on the “Overjustification Effect” , which is to say it isn’t just my opinion. One simplification of the phenomenon is that something that is interesting and motivating in and of itself becomes much less so when someone else tells you it is, or tells you how to be interested, or demands that you explain exactly how you are interested.
There is a related effect (which I am too lazy to find references to, but trust me, I’m not making it up) where someone that is instinctively talented at something is studied to determine how they do that thing they do through questioning and validating those unconscious processes, cease to be good at it. Usually it is temporary, but sometimes it is permanent.
All of which is to say that if you want your team to innovate, let them come up with what they will be innovative about, come to an agreement on a time frame where they can demonstrate progress, and then get out of their way. Trying to set detailed steps and milestones for innovation will greatly lower the odds of getting to a point where defining detailed steps and milestones will lead to an innovated solution.





© Scott S. Nelson