Company-mandated 'play' is the latest craze—but there are far better ways to spark innovation
By ALEC FOEGE
It's the latest R&D trend: penciling in tinkering time on the company clock. The current craze started with Google's well-known "20% Time" initiative, which encouraged employees to spend 20% of their time at work on a project not related to their job description. (click below to read more)
Then came Apple, which early in 2012 launched an in-house tinkering program—exactly the kind famously prohibited by its late founder Steve Jobs—known as Blue Sky. More recently, LinkedIn announced InCubator, an in-house program encouraging the company's engineers to develop their own ideas into projects with the promise of 30 to 90 days away from their regular work to develop them.
The basic idea is the same: Companies need innovative ideas and products, the kind that usually come from small startups. So why not nurture the startup mentality in-house and reap all the glory and the profits?
Well, because it rarely works.
Even when done right, institutionalized playtime has its limits. Many of today's companies have the best of intentions when they sponsor "hack days" or "hackathons," hoping to inspire even the lowliest drones to step forward with their brilliant pet projects. In practice, though, these structured "fun time" activities are the contemporary equivalent of the dreaded corporate retreat (pass the medicine ball).
Scheduled playtime at work is actually nothing new: 3M began its 15%-time program in 1948. And Hewlett-Packard had tinkering time scheduled for Friday afternoons after lunch from its earliest days. Both companies squeezed big products out of these free-form creative sessions, from Post-its to laser printers.
As for Google? Gmail, Google News and AdSense reportedly all evolved out of 20% Time. But even Google has its limits: In July 2011, it shut down Google Labs, a platform open to the public that allowed commenting on the latest Google 20% projects. Last summer, it retrenched further by requiring managerial approval for a tinkering project.
Today's corporate employees are heavily monitored, both in terms of time and resources. For most of them, commanding them to tinker at the company's expense is understandably terrifying. They've got enough to do already, thank you very much. Innovation, at its heart, is a torturous, anarchical act. True tinkerers are dilettantes, free-form creative types motivated more by their own curiosity than by the bottom line. In short, they aren't the kinds of employees most big companies like adding to the payroll in the first place. Also, being ordered to tinker robs the activity of personal passion.
So, if we can't institutionalize tinkering, how do we get more of it?
Procter & Gamble has earned much praise for its Connect + Develop program, which partners with external companies to convince them to innovate for P&G. Short of acquisitions, this may be the most efficient way to inject the verve of a promising startup into a big company.
Another model to consider is a private-public hybrid. The German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg toiled for nearly a decade at the Fraunhofer Society, a German research organization funded by government investments and corporate contracts, to develop a way of transmitting high-fidelity music over phone lines. In the end, he came up with the MPEG-3 technology that spawned the MP3 file-sharing music revolution, the ultimate prize for music fans.
A more radical idea may be to allow tinkerers to profit more from their innovations than the companies that sponsor them. Fusenet Inc., a Toronto-based software company, allows technical staff to spend every Friday working on projects of their own design. Individual employees own the rights to anything they develop. In return, they give Fusenet the right of first refusal to invest in any commercial venture that results from the innovation.
The wrong approaches to tinkering mostly require employees to shoulder a burden that managers themselves don't: the true risk and consequences of complete aimlessness. The right ones demand creating within the corporate framework a space of genuine creative chaos without clear goals, where repeated failure is a real and constant motivator.
Not surprisingly, most reputable organizations aren't ready to take that leap. But they should be.
—Adapted from Mr. Foege's "The Tinkerers: The Amateurs, DIYers, and Inventors Who Make America Great," published this month by Perseus Books.
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