Yahoo’s Innovation Recipe: Iterate, See Customer Reactions, Launch Fast.
“Within Silicon Valley, Yahoo! has a reputation for being bureaucratic and slow to innovate, especially in contrast to rival Google. To infuse itself with startup energy, Yahoo began an offsite incubator late last year called Brickhouse (BusinessWeek, Feb. 26)”.
“Its job is to shorten the time it takes to bring new ideas to market. ‘The goal is to take the idea, develop it, and make sure it’s seen by senior management quickly,’ says Salim Ismail, whose business card reads, simply, ‘Head of Brickhouse.’ ‘We need to iterate, see customer reactions, and launch fast,‘ he says”.
Read Reena Jana’s article on BusinessWeek.
The Brickhouse Process:
- Yahoo’s employees submit new product proposals, some involving mock-ups
- About 200 happen to be received each month
- They are screened as part of a funnel expected to deliver 10 projects a year
- The selected few end up being reviewed by a council of 5-6 top execs
- The winners get to join the Brickhouse over 4-6 months as part of small agile teams
- Those worth productizing get into an accelerated development process
- Fast iteration of proof of concept prototypes involve early customer feedback
- As a result, Fire Eagle took 3 months to develop instead of Yahoo’s 8-12 month average
- Teams whose ideas succeed receive additional financial compensation
- Team members whose projects don’t pan out return to their full-time jobs
Examples:
- Pipes is one of the early products delivered by Yahoo’s Brickhouse model, which is the mashup engine I have been using to deliver the “Innovation newsfeed” posted below.
- Fire Eagle is in alpha testing and the product delivers “a new way to share [broadcast] your location with friends or with other websites and services! It’s built on open APIs so that developers can build all kinds of applications that respond to your location”. This is a permissions based system, giving the user the ability to select to share his/her location and what specific services can use it.
Related posts:
- Innovation at Yahoo: Brickhouse, April 07
- Yahoo taps into its inner startup, February 07
J. de Francisco 
Chicago, IL. 21 November 07 
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“The Top 10″ at the time of uploading this article: [1] Design Concepts: Future Car. [2] The Top 10 Best R&D Companies In The World. [3] Mobile Phone Concepts: Egy Studio. [4] USA: “Amazon’s Kindle & Sprint”; EU: “Polymer Vision & TIM”. [5] Innovative Mobile Phones: Objects Of Desire. [6] Mobile Blogging (6): Use Your Phone As A 3G Modem. [7] Mobile Applications (1). [8] “Visual Futurist: The Art & Life Of Syd Mead”. [9] Transforming Your Old Laptop Into An “Internet Communicator” (2). [10] Transforming Your Old Laptop Into An “Internet Communicator”.
Thats a great post.
betterretail
21 Nov 07 at 1:26 pm