Innovation in our name and Culture

By Filip Eldic, Bluedot Co-Founder

Bluedot Innovation was founded with three simple principles in mind: innovation, execution and integrity

One, however, stood out and this is why it is in our name: innovation.

Innovation is in our blood, in our minds and most importantly, in our culture. The only way an organisation can grow and succeed in the modern era is if innovation is so deeply ingrained in their culture, that doing something that isn’t innovative, difficult or that challenges the status quo, would feel unusual.

Large corporations often struggle with innovation and it is rarely part of their culture. This is because their culture is driven by risk. The risk of being fired, the risk of not delivering, the risk of a decline in share price by 1 percent. Startups nearly always entail a lot of risk and anyone working within a startup must accept this risk and not dwell on it otherwise, they will never grow and die by paralysis. Instead a startup copes with risk by innovating, not by focusing on it, obsessing with it and letting it drive their actions.

However a single person cannot overcome the fear of risk, it needs to be driven from within an organisation by every member and this is instilled from the very first moment a startups culture is formed. So how do we, at Bluedot, instill innovation in our culture? Through empowerment, ownership and flexibility.

When we started forming our team, we made some crucial decisions to enable this. We gave our developers the flexibility to work within the hours that suited their personal circumstances, as long as they did full time hours and the job got done. We enabled them to choose their own development tools, languages and methodologies. We even ask our developers to estimate how long it will take them to build things and only hold them to what they say they can do, we never tell them when something has to be done.

What this results in is that each person within Bluedot owns their part of the work. They are connected to it, they have envisioned it, designed it and driven it to completion. This is why everyone of us at Bluedot always thinks, what is the next innovation or advancement that can be instilled into our product. Because what we build at Bluedot is not the property of Bluedot, it is the fruit of labor, effort and determination of every one of us and hence it belongs to all of us.

We deliver innovative solutions because innovation is in our culture, because we are all empowered to work as we need and want, because we all own our bit of work and we all know that the job needs to get done, but that managing of how it gets done to every minute detail is not important.

This is how we foster innovation and while some may think our methods too lax and unfocused, we balance this with a focus on execution. More on this in the next update.