The Google Innovation Method is one of the best ways to introduce new features or products into the mix. If you aren't familiar with the concept, it's allocating 20% of your engineering team's time to devote just to coming up with product/feature ideas and prototyping them. Your development team is in fact a largely untapped resource for ideation, with the unrealized benefit of knowing what is possible, feasible and how to do it.

But fitting in time to innovate is a cultural paradigm shift, it not only needs to be socialized but also needs work flow around it.

Scheduling
The first thing that needs to be worked out at an organizational level is how you want to schedule your innovation time. If you follow Google's model and allocate 20% that could mean one day a week or maybe one week a month, or any other iteration of that. Find out what works for your organization. One day a week might be hard to maintain momentum working on something, but might be a good way to plan for larger initiatives.

Whatever schedule you opt for it's important to factor innovation time in project schedules during planning. If you fail to take this step its far too easy to sacrifice your innovation time to the completion of existing products or features. It also makes sure that your main project velocity isn't impacted.

Preparation
When it comes to innovation time organization is key. Left unattended this time can be completely unproductive or used to explore rabbit holes, but it's a delicate balance to make sure that the process isn't micromanaged.

To make sure that the time is spent productively it's important to set a direction. You can do this by polling the team for ideas. Identify the strongest ideas and create teams around these ideas with the end result being a working prototype.

Strong Follow Through
Teams will quickly get demoralized or cynical about the process if they see no follow through on the innovation ideas. At my company we hold a science fair type procession to demo all of the prototypes that were created in our lab week. Whatever your method, its most import to get your innovation ideas out into the wild, launched to production. This not only is satisfying for your developers but also justifies the endeavor to your business unit.

Read more from Tom Barker.