Innovation: Skunk Works

The problem with having hackers is that most are pretenders. As Paul Graham says, "This attitude is sometimes affected. Sometimes young programmers notice the eccentricities of eminent hackers and decide to adopt some of their own in order to seem smarter. The fake version is not merely annoying; the prickly attitude of these posers can actually slow the process of innovation."

So what do you do with the pretenders? Obviously they must be got rid of. Who best to do it than the real hackers. In a company that is no longer a startup that would be problematic. I think one solution is to have a something on the lines of Lockheed's legendary Skunk Works, where innovative, and highly successful, aircraft like the U-2, the SR-71, and the Stealth fighter were created.

Skunk works need to be separated from the normal, on going, revenue generating, business. It needs to be run with different policies and controls for personnel, finance and administration. Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed gives some idea of how a skunk works is run.

Problem for Small Software Companies
At acmet's Tools BU the GCC port was, in some ways, a skunk works operation.Some of the people on customer-billed projects regarded it as a glorfied on-bench tenure. Some of the people on the project - some time or the other - also felt that they were on-bench. This, I feel, would happen in most small software companies.  It is the job of the senior manager, responsible for the skunk work project, to counter such perceptions.

Clarification
Innovation does not mean invention. A number of people may have done it before, but if for us it is new, then we are being innovative. The innovation need not necessarily lie only in the product. It can lie in the process, or the services bundled with the product. The GCC port work had never been done by us before. It was going to be a new business model for us. For acmet's tools BU it was innovative.