At Kiva, we tend to attract and hire engineers with a strong creative, entrepreneurial streak. This aligns well with Kiva’s office culture - and with our overall mission - an innovative, technology-driven approach to alleviating poverty. However, as the team grows and we become more specialized in an effort to become more efficient, sometimes our day to day work doesn’t always give us an outlet for our creative sides. After a long project involving concepts like currency exchange loss, it’s easy to feel like you spend your entire working life chasing a few misbehaving pennies around the globe, and that your particular slice of the Kiva pie has become a little divorced from the glorious big picture. In June 2010, many of us were finishing up some pretty tough projects, and as a team, we were in a bit of a funk. We talked as a team about what we could do to restore our energy and excitement. Our solution was an idea called “Innovation Iteration”. Innovation Iteration was inspired Google’s 20 Percent Time - and we do indeed spend 20% of our time in Innovation Iterations. However, there are two important differences to the Kiva approach:
