1. How to create a work environment inductive to innovation

Marianne is employed as a Test Specialist at Sogeti, and held previous roles as a Software Engineer, Scrum Master, Developer and High School Teacher. She enjoys speaking about critical thinking, work culture and being a Girl Scout. She sketchnotes live at conferences to share and learn. Her love for IT and the Testing profession comes from a love for puzzles, logic, and structure mixed together with her creative, writing and crocheting mind. She loves to explore, meet people from different countries and cultures, read voraciously and dream outrageously.

GoForIT is a 24 hour challenge focused on Innovation. Participants sign up with a team and their ideas. These ideas are NOT tested beforehand on feasibility or viability, and you are not required to succeed. Instead, we offer a 24 hour window in which you can attempt to create anything, and then see if it has value to take further.

All those ideas that you think might make your life easier, but you never find time for: using new technologies such as a HoloLens and investigate their viability for cooperating remotely; creating tools to examine algorithms in data to uncover new patterns. During the 24 hour GoForIT challenge: try them out!

The sole condition: at the end of the 24 hours, you present your work to your colleagues in an Innovation Market Place. If you want to take your idea further, we help you find sponsors within the organization. If you found your idea doesn’t work or has no merit: then at least you learned something valuable.

To self-organize this GoForIT challenge, we had to jump over our mental hurdles and have the audacity to say: we are going to do this! (and we’ll find the support afterwards). This is our story of what we had to tackle, what challenges we faced, and how much energy all of us gained at the Innovation Market Place, where our colleagues showed of their enthusiasm and ideas.

We wish to share our story to encourage you to create a similar environment in which innovation, fun and failure go hand in hand, and you reinvigorate your teams to think outside the box of daily work.