I wish more tech companies encouraged (or even mandated) a day or two out of the year as 'hack day projects'. This is similar to Google's 20% projects but significantly compressed in time. Companies would benefit tremendously from actually sparking innovated ideas in this manner instead of using traditonal "suggestion box" type proposals that go nowhere since those tend to be all talk but no show. Instead what it currently promotes is for its developers to start their own side projects outside of work that lead to them leaving to work on their own business/startup.
Atlassian is a company that is well known for encouraging employee creativity.
First of all, they have a 20% time similar to Google. 20% of the whole work week can be spent on a personal project, as long as it could be potentially beneficial to Atlassian.
They also have something called a "FedEx" day - the goal is to deliver a software prototype of something in 24 hours (deliver in 24 hours, hence the name "FedEx"). It's a big competition between developers and there's even a trophy for the winner!
Both of these programs have created a lot of awesome features for their software. I think it's something that others should consider emulating...
Yelp's third Hackathon starts tomorrow (or tonight for the teams who want to get a head start) and runs until Friday afternoon, at which point the teams present what they've been working on. The previous Hackathon at Yelp spawned the iPad powered Kegmate.
This is Michael CEO of Justin.tv - I have to say that this was a huge amount of fun and great for morale. I recommend hack days for all young tech companies.
