What's innovation mean? Innovation is the action or process of innovating. What's innovating mean? Innovating means to make changes in something established, by introducing new methods, ideas, or products. Now we are getting somewhere. What does innovation mean to us at JustBats.com and how to we go about quantifying our innovation decisions? Sometimes, innovation actually starts out with, "wouldn't it be cool if we could…….," but most of the time there's a process JustBats.com uses.
Innovation means to JustBats.com a mixture of planning, research, and trial and error. That's our process. JustBats.com performs detailed planning to make sure growth is managed properly, but last year, JustBats.com hit some limits. For example, the search on JustBats.com was good, but under load it slowed down. The search needed to be less affected by load, so the team found a scalable solution that exceeded our expectations. If you ask the programming team, they had lots of trial and error getting the new search index online, but their efforts can be seen when you use JustBats.com and search for Baseball Bats or Softball Bats. It's very fast. Google-fast. That was by no accident.
In quantifying innovation, I like to start with clarifying the desired result(s). The clearer this is, the easier the innovation will be to implement. In taking something that does not exist, to something that does, requires lots of questions. Asking the questions means we care about the result(s). There's no perfect one-size-fits-all innovation-cycle for every company, but JustBats.com has setup many ways to listen to our customers/employees and is making sure the technology supports its primary aim of making customers for life.