Archive For The “Innovation Services” Category
Innovation service companies, like Atomic Object, sell their time and talents to help clients grow revenue or expand a market through the creation of software. Without products of their own, innovation service firms have no financial leverage: it’s an hour out, a dollar in. Like a shark that can’t stop swimming or it will drown, [...]
Atomic Object is opening a second office. That’s a big deal for Atomic, as it’s our first expansion beyond Grand Rapids, and a big deal for me, keen as I am on the issues of size, quality and culture. We chose Detroit for this expansion, for reasons I blogged about on Spin. What I’d like [...]
Helping entrepreneurs with their startup requires you to begin from a place of surplus, with a reserve of certain capacities not easily measured. The obvious sort of capacity — developer time, designer time, wall space, team space — is the kind we’re perennially short of at Atomic, but which can be readily measured and planned. [...]
One of the reasons that I believe innovation services firms are so important to our economy is that they are incubators of talent. Whether a firm retains the talent it helps create and therefore makes it available to its clients, or whether the talent migrates to a product company, the economy and our communities benefit. [...]
I just got home from the Software Craftsmanship North America conference. As usual, Obtiva and 8th Light did a great job putting together an excellent event. In only its third year SCNA has grown to nearly 300 attendees, yet not lost its original passion and focus. I gave a talk on Saturday morning entitled Companies [...]
Simon Sinek posits that successful companies know “why” they exist, outside of “what” they do for customers, and “how” they do it. His TED talk seems to be everywhere recently. I’ve seen it on Detroit Venture Partner’s website, heard it in John Hwang’s presentation at BarCampGR, and saw it used in as a part of [...]
I started Great Not Big to share what I’ve learned over 10 years about building and running a custom software development company. I figure there are on the order of 100,000 people in the US who care deeply about this topic.* A question that arose early in the thinking behind GNB was whether people [...]
Software development companies may or may not specialize in one particular domain or technology. Specializing simplifies the job of marketing and sales, can build employee expertise and reputation, creates efficiencies in infrastructure and code re-use, and sometimes results in very fast growth. Pivotal Labs and Hashrocket are great examples of successful companies with specializations in [...]
