It’s that time of year when the spring warmth turns to summer heat. The change of season also marks an important day here at clevermethod: Mt. Cleverest Day. In the same vein as the 3M 15 Percent Rule or the Google 20 Percent Time, Mt. Cleverest Day allows us to work on a problem that we wouldn’t get to in the course of our day-to-day work. You can team up with a colleague or run a solo mission on an idea, just as long as you can finish it in a day. 3M pioneered the idea of giving employees company time to work out solutions to any problem. Emphasis on innovation and failure has kept 3M prospering. Many of 3M’s famed products were discovered while employees worked on 15 percent time, Sticky Notes and sandpaper to name a few.
This year we have teams working on a variety of projects, including building a game that leverages Unity. Meeting applications were a popular topic this year. We had two groups working on two different meeting apps. An in-meeting app provides a common place for meeting attendees to add comments, allot time for topics, and email notes to attendees at the conclusion of the meeting, etc. Another group worked on developing a digital display to show room availability for our conference rooms. This uses a Raspberry Pi and a digital screen and connects to our calendars to show who is using the rooms and at what time. We also developed new assets for our social media (including this blog post), check out our Game of Thrones themed tweets here, here, and here.
Our blood, sweat, and tears went into this day. Mostly Dave’s blood after he sliced his finger on the underside of a table. Dave got 5 stitches and a new nickname: Ser Daveos, and we got to fill out our first OSHA form.
At the end of the day we compile the projects into a presentation and show them off to the partners the following day. Some of our projects were just practical applications of learning a new program or method. Some ideas are applied to projects we are currently working on, and some ideas are shelved for another day. Creative and innovative companies provide forums to pursue creative and innovative ideas. Mt. Cleverest Day is our forum.