Colin Stewart at the Orange County Register has compiled eleven lessons that Blizzard has learned by being innovative with its products. In case you have not heard of them, Blizzard is the company that has created a number of the best selling computer games in the last 10 years including World of Warcraft. The article itself has a couple inaccuracies in terms of Blizzard's and computer gaming history, but it has some useful points. Read the article if you'd like to see them all, but there are a couple that particularly stood out for me.

The importance of frequent failures
Larger organizations with a lot of cash on hand have a bit more flexibility, but smaller organizations can still take a grain of truth away from this. The point is that if you are trying to be really innovative, not every idea is going to pan out. As long as you learn something though, the investment of money and time is not wasted. In smaller organizations, following an iterative approach is one way to take risks without investing too much in a single idea all at once. The next concept addresses that.

Move quickly, in pieces
Blizzard uses a prototyping development approach that allows them to be flexible in the features they add to World of Warcraft. They develop the features that users ask for rather than doing long, full waterfall-style development cycles that include extended requirements gathering and project planning. That does not mean though that you can just fly by the seat of your pants. You just do shorter term planning that can be implemented in weeks rather than months or years.

Demand excellence or you'll get mediocrity
In a way, you have to trust the work ethic and skills of your team a lot more when you don't use the full software development life cycle. There is a lot more judgment that needs to happen in a rapid development in terms of priorities and specific tasks. The concept of excellence also applies to the end product. If your end result is not excellent, then you really did not gain much from your innovation other than time. While time can be useful, it does not mean much in the IT field because so many things are imitable given enough time.

Offer employees something extra
Part of Blizzard's success comes from getting its employees excited about their work. While there are many IT jobs that are not perceived to be as glamorous as being a game programmer, there are still things that you can do to motivate your employees. IT workers are in a very intellectual field, and if you can give them an opportunity to flex their brain power, you can often get real excitement out of them. That is why I am putting an innovation budget into my budgets this year. By offering an opportunity for my staff to be really creative, I think they will be even more excited about their work than they would be normally.