Contributed by Bruce Kitto, Director, SAS R&D

We recently introduced a concept called “Do Your Own Thing” day in the Customer Intelligence Division of SAS R&D, and I wanted to tell you a little about it.

Like most R&D divisions at most companies, our employees are focused most of the time on specific product deliverables. So, it can be tough to do as much of the “R” part of R&D as we might like.

“Do Your Own Thing” day - we actually did two days this time around – is designed to encourage some dedicated research time. The guidelines are simple: do anything you’d like as long as it has something to do with technology, process, or work. Something like learning to paint is probably not a fit, unless of course you learn how to paint offices in which case it does relate to work—at least with all of the office moves we’ve had here lately. Project ideas could include learning a new programming language, researching how to leverage agile development techniques when you are a team of one, learning more about social media, writing a utility to perform some task you do time and time again, learning about Hadoop or Cassandra, and so on.

You get the idea. In addition to just being plain fun, I wanted to use this as a technique to get at what I’ll call the “seeds of innovation.” Out of the 50 projects, a few will turn out to be something that leads to some more in-depth research. Of those, a few will hopefully turn into full-fledged innovative product features, process improvements or new innovative thought processes.

After two days of doing our own things, everyone on the team wrote up a paragraph or two about their projects and results, and published them to the social network on the SAS intranet, and the entire group voted on which ones they liked the best and wanted to hear more about.

The top 5 were:

1. An iPad application that monitors our development environments for response times and shows them charted out on our iPads over time.
2. A Windows plug-in called Funboard that allows you to take multiple screenshots (or other images) and bring them together with drawing-style annotation and voiceovers. It then bundles everything together into a compressed video image that can be shared with others.
3. A new build process using the Jenkins open source tool.
4. Research around using the Google App Engine to access Java development environment where Google takes care of all of the environmental issues.
5. An iPad prototype for displaying Web Analytics.

For each of the above projects, we discussed as a team different ways to implement these ideas further into our products or R&D processes, or into other areas of the company such as tech support.

There were so many other projects that I would have loved to personally review and be able to share. I received great feedback from people about the exercise. It was also one of the quietest pair of days I’ve seen in awhile, since everyone was heads-down working on what they wanted to work on.

Overall, it was a great success for what I had in mind and I think people enjoyed it as well. If you’d like to know more about what we did, leave a comment here, and we’ll discuss more.

Finally, if anyone needs a Nook application that finds the nearest microbrewery to your current location, you might ask around my division!