“Innovation is a tricky word.”
Asked what signals innovation in a tech company, Tim Brackbill, CTO of Tortuga AgTech, waxed poetic: “Sometimes it’s nothing but a buzzword, and sometimes it’s the lifeblood of a company.”
When the word outstrips its buzzword designation, “innovation” means engaging in fearless exploration — and knowing when to change course. “We’ve rewritten code that’s worked for a long time and redesigned core components of our robots many, many times,” Brackbill told Built In Colorado.
Benjamin Reid, practice lead of BI and data warehousing at DAS42, offered similar musings on building an environment that begets inventiveness.
“Culture is like a garden,” Reid said. “If unmanaged, things will certainly grow, it just may not be what we want.”
But his figurative language is rooted in substantive benchmarks. Reid shared that innovative culture is often reflected in fluctuating key metrics. “Change doesn’t need to be positive,” he added. “If a company is making tweaks here and there but is not really making any impact, you’re not yet in the innovation game — you’re in the optimization game.”
Ultimately, innovation is transcendence over the fear of failure. Wix Site Manager Eli Rothfeld shared that inventiveness vanquishes complacency, while Keith Jensen, chief marketing officer at Brightfin embraced the idea of failing fast.
“Come up with an idea, test, measure, iterate, figure out as quickly as possible whether it moved the needle or not,” Jensen said. “If not: Bail and try the next idea.”
Innovation may be a tricky word, but these four Colorado tech companies have sought to nurture its meaning into well-managed gardens — with cultures deeply rooted in fearlessness and adaptability. Built In Colorado connected with professionals from Tortuga AgTech, Brightfin, DAS42 and Wix to learn more about how to pave one’s own path to ingenuity.
Tortuga AgTech is a greentech company striving to build a healthier society and a thriving planet using agricultural robots and new insights.
What are some signs that a company has a culture of innovation?
At Tortuga, we set big, audacious company goals and empower at all levels of the company to find solutions. We also think differently than anyone else: Innovation means being unique.
We believe that team members at a truly innovative company feel deep ownership over the problem and the solution. In practice, this means encouraging people to suggest something new — a feature, process or fix, large or small — drive it forward as fast as possible, then codify it after it proves useful.
Innovation is about trying new things, thinking differently and throwing something out if it’s not working. We’ve rewritten code, reworked our meetings and rebuilt internal tools.
We also try to innovate on how we work — with weekly meetings, a quarterly survey where we find ways to improve and things like “bug days,” where engineers tackle minor annoyances or major problems.
Members at a truly innovative company feel deep ownership over the problem and the solution.”
How do you personally make space for innovative ways of doing business?
We’re driven to solve the problems our farmer customers face every day. When we hire, we look for employees who are naturally curious. We thrive in pushing boundaries in engineering and team management.
A good example of this is our rapid prototyping approach to building robots. We are currently on our seventh major generation of robots in only six years, with multiple revisions within each generation. So, we’ve re-built our robots basically from scratch at least seven times.
Our goal is always to get our latest innovations into the actual field quickly, so we can learn and iterate based on real-world, on-farm situations. We also send people from every team at the company to the field. This allows teams to collaborate and come up with new ideas that often are much more unique and creative than those that come out of office work.
What are some of the challenges your company has faced in developing or maintaining this type of culture?
When we started, we rebuilt the entire robot and the company every few months. While we’re more stable now, we’re still at the very forefront of autonomous robotics. We must keep innovation at our core, so we can stay in the lead of this frontier industry.
What has been challenging is making sure people stay empowered to raise new ideas and concerns. We may have thought of it before, and there’s a good reason why we haven’t done it — or, maybe now is exactly the time that the idea needs to be brought up again. And, often, an idea is completely new and makes sense. We want people who join our 50-person company to still feel like founders and owners.
Scaling up requires significant problem-solving of both technical and operational issues that only arise when you have 100 robots instead of 1. Our business is inherently innovative, because learning how to operate robots on farms is a totally new and different thing — that few other companies have ever tried.
Wix is an enterprise web company that seeks to empower any business or individual in the world to build their website and create an impactful online presence.
What are some signs that a company has a culture of innovation?
For us here at Wix, learning is not only constant, but required. We truly believe that if we’re not constantly trying to improve our strategy, we’ll fall behind. It keeps us on our toes and makes sure we never get complacent.
For us here at Wix, learning is not only constant, but required.”
How do you personally make space for innovative ways of doing business?
We need to make sure that every employee feels like they have space to bring an idea to light, and — more importantly — to feel like their ideas are heard. I often ask my team for their ideas before I suggest any of my own, which is part of the culture of learning. You have to be aware that different perspectives and experiences being shared can often lead to a better product.
What are some of the challenges your company has faced in developing or maintaining this type of culture?
The biggest challenge has been making sure we can keep a consistent feedback loop as we’ve scaled. We’ve needed to make absolutely sure that we’ve carved out dedicated space for ideas to be shared and acted upon. With the speed we move at, if we don’t stop along the way and thoroughly discuss what we can be doing better, we run the risk of small problems becoming much larger. This strategy has helped us to be more intentional in our decisions.
DAS42 provides cloud-based data analytics consulting and professional services that help executives and managers reduce the time to actionable insights and empower them to make more informed decisions.
What are some signs that a company has a culture of innovation?
The first sign is that there is evidence of actual change that impacts key metrics of the company. Everything is an experiment and not all experiments succeed. Innovation is inherently a higher-risk, higher-reward activity.
Another area to assess is where innovative initiatives come from. Is it considered a product activity only? Is it a top-down affair? Doing so can still drive new ideas and progress, but it’s limited in scope. The space to share new ideas from all levels and departments opens up the scope of possibility and creates a much larger opportunity for the company. Product leaders become more curators and coaches rather than star players.
The last area I look for is agility. Can new ideas be generated and evaluated rapidly? Is there a feedback loop around the process? This is a very data and analytics-oriented discipline. Both ideas and infrastructure need to be ready to rock for the process of innovation to work consistently.
The space to share new ideas from all levels and departments opens up the scope of possibility and creates a much larger opportunity for the company.”
How do you personally make space for innovative ways of doing business?
You have to create the framework. Culture is about both how we interact with each other and the shared experience.
Strong culture creates patterns for how we discuss current progress, how we consider things from multiple perspectives and how we translate ideas into action. This develops a common language such that everyone can plug in and be productive.
Lacking culture, you run the risk of junior staff not having a defined method of discussing new ideas and senior staff having potentially competing or exclusive methods of discussion. In other words, it’s important to create a singular culture.
It’s so important to have a good framework for working through facts and opinions. The fact side of the equation needs to be reliable and detailed, so that it can support discussions around how to interpret the facts. A culture that’s mostly opinion-based is going to have challenges driving consistent innovation and having a good experience in the process.
What are some of the challenges your company has faced in developing or maintaining this type of culture?
Like a lot of companies, we run the risk of having a “cobbler’s children have no shoes” dynamic. We’ve ramped up efforts to harness the thinking and discipline that we bring to our client projects back into our internal processes. I feel it reaffirms the value of outside perspective — it’s often easier to spot areas of improvement in another environment rather than the one you exist in. We’ve spent time thinking through what works in our clients and how to synthesize that into what works for us.
One of the big takeaways around developing a data-driven process of innovation is looking at processes like a software release. The process is never considered complete and shelved: It’s constantly being updated, enhanced, modernized. This keeps us plugged into it and gets the most out of the efforts put in.
Brightfin is a fintech company that helps its customers track mobile, fixed and cloud expenses in one scalable, automated platform that features actionable dashboards.
What are some signs that a company has a culture of innovation?
Honestly, any company can tout their own culture of innovation. But one of the best signs is validation from customers, analysts and industry peers.
On that note, we received some amazing news recently that Brightfin has been positioned by Gartner as a visionary in the “Magic Quadrant for Globally Managed Mobility Services” — a huge honor.
Our value proposition of having one unified platform built natively on ServiceNow is resonating with our clients and prospects. Being recognized by Gartner as a visionary is external validation that we’re on the right track to adding incredible value for IT leaders across the globe.
One of the best signs is validation from customers, analysts and industry peers.”
How do you personally make space for innovative ways of doing business?
The key for our team is to continuously test new ideas. Personally, I like to live by the idea of failing fast.
As an organization, we push ourselves to improve the processes that organizations use for their technology expense management (TEM). Anyone familiar with the TEM industry knows that it’s certainly not very exciting. However, at Brightfin we try to create unique content and funny videos to break through and let our personalities shine.
What are some of the challenges your company has faced in developing or maintaining this type of culture?
Brightfin is a global team with an almost entirely remote workforce. That means we have people in different timezones, with different roles and different backgrounds all working to achieve the same goal. As everyone knows in the post-pandemic world, creating a culture with remote teams is no easy feat. In order to address these challenges, we have set in motion a culture committee that helps unite teams from across the organization.
During town halls, the committee leadership team provides clear direction for how each of the various teams contributes to our overall success. But for a culture to really stick, it has to be built from the people in the organization.
For our team, we create time every couple weeks to meet just as people. Not trying to solve technology expense management, or even discuss anything related to Brightfin. We meet just to get to know each other better. What are we passionate about? What cool things do we know that we can share with each other? That really helps break up the ongoing grind of constantly innovating.
