Hacking Marketing

20Collaborative Designs and the Quest for New Ideas

Everybody innovates.

That's the philosophy many modern software development teams embrace. Rather than isolate responsibility for innovation in a specialized group, every developer is encouraged to contribute fresh ideas to the team and to pursue, within reason, intriguing new possibilities as an integral part of accomplishing his or her work. This plants more seeds of discovery, and it makes people's jobs more interesting and fulfilling.

Marketing can benefit from this democratized model of innovation as well.

Although in larger companies it may make sense to have dedicated individuals or teams who are focused on particular emerging businesses and touchpoints—through an innovation center or a marketing lab—any company can construct a much broader innovation group by allocating time and money for exploratory activities across existing marketing teams.

Committing that time and money across a team can be a hard choice but a valuable one.

Time, Money, and Innovation

Because modern marketing has become so operationally intense—there is always more to do than hours in the day—it's tempting to manage our teams at close to 100 percent capacity with the work of the status quo. We can easily end up with little or no slack in our schedules.

Many people have tried to run software teams that way too. It's appealing to squeeze out as much heads-down work as possible for short-term gains without wasting time, so to speak, on things that ...