Innovation Day at Energetiq: Creativity in Advanced Illumination

(February 22, 2022)

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The second Wednesday of every month is Innovation Day at Energetiq. We know how important it is to create space and time dedicated to innovation. Employees can work together or individually on creative or new initiatives. It’s a unique opportunity to step outside of our typical mindset to try new things and expand our knowledge.

Here's how Innovation Day works, why it's important to our company culture, and how it helps us create leading Laser-Driven Light Source technologies for our customers.

Create Experiments

We think of all Innovation Day projects as “experiments.” You start with “what if…?” Some of these will be a dead-end; they don’t offer the advantage you thought they might, or they’d take more time and resources than the benefit justifies. These aren’t failed experiments. Any experiment is successful if it answers the question that was initially posed. “That won’t work” is a perfectly valid outcome.

Learn and Move On to the Next Thing

There’s cultural mythology about Genius and the "Aha moment," where most good and even great ideas come out of a lot of trial and error. Innovation Day is about generating lots of ideas and studying them for a bit, turning them over, and looking at all sides. In most cases, this should be done with a group of Energetiq collaborators, asking questions, proposing approaches, and considering implications. Sometimes Innovation Day is about studying a peripheral or tangential field and thinking about how practices or solutions “over there” might help solve a problem “over here.”

Get Creative and Enjoy Your Work

Innovation Day isn’t supposed to put pressure on employees. It’s instead supposed to take some of the pressure off and make some space for study, contemplation, experimentation, creativity, and just playing with ideas.

So, why does Innovation Day matter to anyone outside of Energetiq?

Creating time and space that allows our employees, no matter their role, to flex creativity translates to greater innovation in customer solutions. We know that working in high brightness applications requires the rapid development of long-lasting products that fit volume production needs. We can't take our time reaching a solution when a customer brings a unique and complex light source challenge to the table.

Tapping into creativity and exploring experiments outside standard solutions prepares the Energetiq team to meet any customer challenge, no matter how complex. And you can be confident that when you partner with Energetiq, you're tapping into the true problem-solving, innovative spirit that drives everything we do.