The Innovation Formula

CHAPTER 9 RESOURCING In for a penny, but not necessarily in for a pound

In 2005 the management team at Intuit was studying the likes of Google and 3M, both of which famously implemented a concept called 20% Time, in which employees were allowed to spend 20 per cent of their time at work on self-set innovation projects. The research had suggested that this initiative had led to greater employee engagement. Inspired by these stories, Intuit's CTO began asking several leaders within the business, ‘Who wants to experiment with a program like this?'

Hugh Molotsi worked in the Small Business group at Intuit at the time. ‘Our product development leader responded to the call saying, “Yes. We'll experiment”. We launched a 10 per cent program we ended up calling ‘Unstructured Time' in the Small Business group and decided that we would run it for a year and report out to the rest of the company how it was going. It was almost immediately so successful that a couple of other business units just sort of jumped in and said “Yeah, we're going to do it, too”.'

By 2008 Intuit's newly anointed CEO Brad Smith declared that Unstructured Time was for everybody.

It's all well and good to say to every employee ‘spend half a day a week working on whatever you like', but it's another thing to consider how that works practically, on a day-to-day basis. For example, do employees need to get approval for what they work on in this self-set time?

‘The intent is that there's no approval needed', explains ...