Innovation and serendipity

Innovation tends to strike when we face challenges. It could be anywhere and in any situation, but when a great idea forms it tends to a produce one of those rare moments of exceptional focus and clarity. There’s nothing quite like it.

One Hour Rule

At Dejan SEO we have a simple rule. If something takes more than one hour of your time and you do it more than once per month, it should be automated. In the last five years we’ve produced numerous pieces of unique software, each solving a particular problem. Collectively, however, our tools created an entirely new problem as we tried to integrate them into a single framework.

Organic vs Planned

Each attempt to organise our software into a suite seemed uninspired, but as we’d return to our seats, ideas would come back. It seems that innovation is not something you can schedule or plan.

Collaboration and Innovation

Team environment is essential for creative thought, but a team on its own will not necessarily generate cohesive ideas. Everything starts with individual thought. Our most productive sessions were initiated spontaneously and the role of the team was to assess, evaluate and append the original idea.

This article was first published in Impact @ Griffith Sciences magazine. Click here for more details

Innovation is Disruptive

Development resources are never unlimited. In my own team I am known as both an “ideas man” and a “disruptor”. While I often come up with unique solutions to our problems I also have a poor habit of re-prioritising our development work towards a new idea. If uncontrolled this can lead to a lot of half-finished product.

Innovation Case: Crack in the Matrix

Google is a transparent company, up to a point; they fiercely guard the details of their search algorithm. While analysing large amounts of web traffic data I noticed unusual trends and patterns in Google’s search results. This represented an unknown variable in the commercial world where we rely on solid metrics in order to make business decisions with confidence.

It was clear that an external factor influenced website’s performance in Google. Looking at each site individually it was hard to tell what took place, but we knew we had tracking in place for around 20,000 search queries. And this is where an idea popped up.

We decided to aggregate all available data and consolidate fluctuations in search results into a single graph. We ended up with Algoroo, a Google volatility index which looks like this:

The tool provides us with a valuable metric which can be utilised in traffic reports to correlate internal data with major fluctuations in Google’s results. We’re now able to see when Google’s engineers change something in their algorithm and our data matches publicly announced updates with close to 100% accuracy. The “roo” quickly became an internationally adopted metric, often referenced by major industry news websites.