Innovation = Impact
When you’re heads down, immersed in emails, slacks, and meetings, and you look up to see that your company has been named one of the 50 World’s Most Innovative for 2020, you pause. It’s a brief moment of affirmation, but when you’ve spent the last 3 years fundamentally changing the course of a 15-year old platform, moments like this make a difference. As Vimeo’s CEO I see constant innovation from our team, but it’s especially cool to see the outside world taking notice.
There are countless books, articles and podcasts out there on the subject of innovation. And there are plenty of qualified minds to opine on what innovation in tech and in video means. But I’ve got my own view, and I figure today is a fitting day to share it.
Innovation to me is not about having a shiny new idea, or the most cutting edge A.I., or being the first to launch a product. It’s not validated by rankings, patents, awards, or even business metrics.
Ideas are just that: ideas. They don’t mean anything if we aren’t solving real problems for real people. Ideas only mean something when they translate to impact.
You know you’re innovating when you put something impactful out into the world that people use often and love using. For us that means building products that make professional-quality video so simple, and so effective that millions of more people can unlock its power. Once we focused on this outcome, and on delivering impact, we were able to transform as a company.
I’ve seen Vimeo grow from under 100 people on 1 floor in NYC to over 600 people across 5 global offices. I’ve seen us pivot from a viewing destination to a technology platform, enter new markets, acquire companies and launch new capabilities that push us to unfamiliar frontiers. Along the way we’ve had to evolve our capacity to innovate. So how do we infuse innovation at scale? Here are some of ways we’re doing it today:
Don’t ring-fence innovation.
Every employee is responsible for it.
Many traditional companies have R&D or Innovation Labs where the responsibility to invent and push boundaries lies with specific people. At Vimeo, we’ve tried to create the autonomy and agility for innovation to bubble up organically, no matter what your role or level. What we’ve found is that when your goals are clear and focused, and people across the company feel empowered and unconstrained, they can accomplish things you never imagined. We have engineers authoring their own blog, contributing to open source code and hosting conferences. We have product teams organizing cross-company Show & Tells and creatives hosting cross-company design critiques. This innate energy becomes a driving force that directly benefits our users: everything from the revival of Vimeo Festival & Awards to our Ladies with Lenses program to our stock footage marketplace have been borne from individuals within the company who were passionate about an idea and took ownership to make it happen.
Another example is Vimeo Jam, our hallowed tradition that brings teams together across the world to collaborate and dream up the future of video. It’s entirely employee-led and anyone at the company can participate. The goal is to work on projects you would never otherwise work on, with people you might never otherwise work with. The results are often out-of-the-box thinking and amplified collaboration: everything from how video can be used to protect our planet to interactive ways to increase video accessibility standards. It’s amazing what people can accomplish in two days with creative space and new faces.
Institutionalize failure.
We all intuitively believe that failure is a healthy part of innovation. You have to swing big to hit home runs, and that means you take risks and make bets that don’t always pan out. But how do you make people truly comfortable taking risks, failing, and failing openly? Much of this is cultural, and it starts at the top. Our leadership team practices owning up when we make mistakes. We open our meetings with a simple “what’s working/what isn’t” framework to encourage transparency upfront and reduce the stigma around failure. The framework creates a repeatable, safe way for people to be unfiltered and real about where we’ve gone wrong, and it forces introspection to help us turn problems into learning opportunities. It gives people permission to be both resilient and bold.
We also take the hits openly when we fail. I’ve launched products that didn’t work out, missed targets, shut down business units, and pursued strategies that failed. I’ve had blindspots that have led me to make the wrong decisions. When those things happen, it’s important to stand up in front of the company and take ownership, and demonstrate how that failure impacts me and everyone else.
Don’t fall in love with the idea. Fall in love with the outcome.
It can be easy to convince yourself that a particular strategy or product investment is the right thing. And you need conviction in order to build something great. But the reality is that if you’re truly building something new, you probably won’t get it right out of the gate. We certainly haven’t. It took us 6 months after launching Vimeo Live to find product-market fit; we did a lot of iterating and talking to users before it became our fastest growing product. We just launched Vimeo Create, and it’s taken us months of beta testing to strike the delicate balance between customization and speed in social video-making.
We’ve learned that the key to impactful innovation is being clear about what success looks like, actively listening to the signals, and moving fast to improve.
We have enormous opportunity to be more innovative and deliver more impact in 2020. We just wrapped up another Vimeo Jam last week, and I left once again humbled by what our brilliant team can accomplish when freed of constraints. The possibilities are endless for how Vimeo can use technology, data and inspiration to help more people unlock the power of video. Which means the possibilities are endless for you.
Illustration art by Bratislav Milenkovic