At Microsoft they call it “out of the box week”.
Google calls it “20% playtime”.
SharedBook calls it “cool factor projects”.
In each of these cases the idea is the same: each engineer gets to spend some percent of their time working on non-core projects, which might lead to future gains. Here in SharedBook we do it ad hoc. Our engineers are encouraged to come up with exciting new ideas, we brainstorm on them a little, and then they are developed in the form of a small POC (proof of concept).
The use of our open API enables us to pull these POCs fairly fast. In fact, most POCs take something like a few hours to generate. Then we show them to SharedBook management, and get some feedback. Quite a few of these cool factor ideas (so named because our team thinks these are cool projects, and we believe that others will find them cool as well) actually materialize into a new application or offering.
Social networks, travel, photos sharing and more, all these are platforms for the creativity of our engineers to flourish. Stay tuned for some really cool projects ahead…
In the meantime, can you think of a cool factor project or idea?
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