Typically, big companies struggle with innovation, as they are slower to change, take risks and implement new ideas. Large corporates aren't traditionally set up to foster entrepreneurship that challenges their existing business models, a common thread seen in today’s startup era. In fact, within the past decade, quick-to-innovate startups have threatened age-old industries and the incumbent companies supporting them, from taxis to hotels to mattresses.
In order to keep up, large tech companies are taking measures to foster intrapreneurship, and create entrepreneurial cultures among their thousands of employees. Among them are a few giants with offices in New York, and these are the perks they have to offer.
SeatGeek, a major player in the online ticket business, has a quarterly tradition of hosting an internal hackathon. The company event hones in collaboration and innovation, giving team members two days to build a new, cool product. The company sees the tradition as an opportunity for its employees to learn and teach by exploring ideas that might not otherwise make it into the daily workflow.
Back in June, AOL launched Area 51, an in-house startup incubator exclusively available to the company’s employees. The idea behind the perk is to provide the funding, membership and tools for AOL employees to develop side projects, with the end goal of either merging those business into AOL or spinning them off into their own entities after the six-month program.
Google is famous for its ‘80/20’ rule, which allows all employees to spend 20 percent of their work time on projects that benefit Google customers. From implementing this policy, projects that have launched out of Google employees’ 20 percent time include Gmail, Google News and AdSense.
The Garage is Microsoft’s outlet for experimental projects among its employees. The program encourages the company’s workers to problem solve in innovative ways, and has four interconnected programs that support different stages of project development. Ultimately, The Garage works to help teams at Microsoft test a hypothesis, receive customer feedback and quickly determine a product market fit.
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