Ian McCaig, the CEO of Lastminute.com, said today that a recession is an opportunity to get your house in order and come out sprinting, saying that people should: “shape yourself for the post-apocalyptic world”. During his talk titled Innovation in a Crisis at the SPA 2009 conference, McCaig said that the push to drive the costs down and be more efficient is a chance to prepare to accelerate out of a recession rather than come stumbling out of it.
As some ideas that his company is implementing to foster innovation without spending too much on research, he mentioned lastminute labs and hack-days. Labs are a research division without permanent staff, where people volunteer to participate in labs projects and can take a break from their day-to-day routine by participating in something interesting. Staff in labs rotate so that different people get to play with innovative ideas. Hack-days are intensive coding competitions that are organised to give people a break from their daily duties but also promote innovation and allow new ideas to bubble up. Participating teams code for 24 hours straight on an idea that they came up with and then have ninety seconds to present their solutions in a Dragons den style event, where their ideas and implementations get evaluated by peers and management. The winners of the competition get management backing to push the idea through to production, and get to work on it. Participating teams are typically three to five people and that they had twelve or thirteen participating teams at the last event.
As some products that came out of those research projects, McCaig mentioned Pronto (“an innovative hotel, flights and restaurant search tool that builds search criteria with sentences and drop-down help”) and fonefood (a mobile restaurant search website aided by location-awareness).
McCaig concluded by saying that the key to fostering innovation in a crisis is to “give people an opportunity to work on this stuff, and when they come up with something good you have to back it”.
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