Corporate Hacking is the act of injecting Innovation into a company’s culture, sometimes bypassing the processes, functions and actors in place.

In 2013, after having witnessed or endured series of reorganizations, aborted programs and failed innovation initiatives, we decided to try and “fix” some of the things that seemed to not be working in our company.

We started the curation of innovation strategies from innovative companies, identified means to improve products and processes, injected creativity in Business Units, and devised activities to boost employees’ motivation.

After a year of experiments trying to improve our company, the insights we gained defined the outline of a more ambitious project: Build a tool able to improve the company’s skills, processes, products, and business, with the interesting property of being able to improve itself.

The list of projects below illustrates the various corporate areas we challenged.

Creativ’ Lab

The Creativ’ Lab was a creativity room, designed and used by a team of researchers. It featured a 10 meter long whiteboard, markers and post-its, comfortable sofas, a small kitchen area, chairs and tables.

From 2011 to 2013, following various reorganizations, its main use slowly turned from creativity to traditional meetings. In 2014, its initial purpose was restored, reinforced, and its scope extended to offer its services to all Alcatel-Lucent teams and projects.

Hackathon Enterprise Products

In order to foster innovation and develop new enterprise products, we organized the preparation of a hackathon on Illkirch Alcatel Enterprise site. We involved top management of the compagny (CTO) and marketing /sales/development and operations teams in a one day creativity session to decide orientations and themes for the hackathon.

Kingyo: Engagement activism

Kingyo was a covert project aiming at boosting employees engagement and motivation through bottom-up hacking of the working environment using concepts of the Fun Theory.

Various projects were explored, like the improvement of lifts with rocket launch sound effects, a light-powered giant tic-tac-toe over a building, or hidden messages and riddles on public screens…

Gamification approach to defect detection

The Gamification of defect detection aimed at identifying gamification opportunities in Quality Assurance activities, and at designing adequate gamification programs.

Ranging from code inspection to live system tests, the analysis led to the identification of several areas and programs that could efficiently use gamification to reduce the overall costs associated to defect detection.

Learning from others: curation of external innovation strategies

We organized a methodic monitoring and curation of most innovative compagnies to get inspiration. Specifically the study of “The Garage” initiative at Google headquarters in Montain View was the trigger of the Beta prototype.