Ask HN: How does your organization recognize, foster and reward innovation?

[torginus]

Hey, so my question is basically the title.

Let's say you realize you could make a tool, library, feature etc. that would your life, the life of your colleagues that much easier. Or you think of a kickass feature that'd make your product that much better?

What are the ways your organization allows for these bottom-up initiatives to come into fruition? What methods and processes worked well in practice? How do you balance this with regular work and red tape?

Please post positive examples that work well, I'd like the theme to be what are the effective ways of handling this, not out of touch management horror stories.

[entuno]

If someone has an idea of an improvement to make, they can put forward a business case for it. Then it gets reviewed by someone in management, and if they agree then time/resource/etc are allocated when scheduling permits. And when I say "business case", I don't mean anything particular formal or structured. Essentially just:

* This is what I want to do. * This is the problem it solves. * I will need $days and $resources to do it.

In terms of how they actually submit the request, it's done by creating an issue on one of our issue tackers (depending on what its related to), which can then either be reviewed asynchronously or discussed directly if required.