Innovation Days for Small Teams – November 14, 2012

On Wednesday November 14th, I gave a talk at the Digital Interactive Gaming conference (DIG Canada) on creating engagement through innovation.

Most small development teams are so busy with the day-to-day running of the business that they never get the time to think about the bigger picture, but giving developers the freedom to build their own solution changes they way they develop, and creates better products for the business.

Innovation Days at Info-Tech changed the tone in many ways and was the first step in making our business see our developers as creative individuals who could deliver more than they were asking, rather than mere implementers of specs.This talk was intended to help people get inspired by learning about how we run our innovation days, and some specific innovation day projects that made significant contributions to our bottom line

At the end of the session we worked through a real life Innovation Day pitch meeting.

The task, come up with a way of improving the DIG Conference.

Now unfortunately my presentation was one of the first ones of the day, but we still ended up with four really good innovations.

1. Team One: Create a mobile website for the DIG conference so that you can find things at a glance during the event.
2. Team Two: Build an a sponsored Mobile Charging Station with some Desktop access for things you can’t do via mobile.
3. Team Three: A responsive mobile website that changed whether you were at the DIG event or not.
4. Team Four: Create an interactive mapping tool which showed where sessions are relative where you are, as well as a full customizable schedule.

Voting (which was done by applause) was pretty much deadlocked, but it sounded like team three won…in the end though we gave victory pens to everyone in the room for participating.

I have my entire speaking deck up at SpeakerDeck.com, check it out and feel free to ask any questions here.

We’re also looking forward to continuing the conversation on Twitter, reach me at @briangarside and tag the conversation with #diginnovate.

About Brian G

Brian Garside has more than 15 years in web design, user experience, and video production. At the Info-Tech Research Group, he is responsible for user experience on the web, and manages the New Initiatives team, ensuring that all new web development adheres to the standards, principles, and processes his team has created. You can read more from Brian at his blog.

Brian Garside has contributed 11 posts to the Info-Tech IT Blog.

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Tags: DIG, Digital Interactive Gaming, London, talks

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2012 at 11:00 am and is filed under Talks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.