The BetFair-TradeFair executives do foster a culture of innovation.

Chris F. Masse November 6th, 2007

Inventions and Innovations at BetFair-TradeFair

Rorie Devine (chief technology officer, BetFair):

Innovation does not just happen. For it to happen, you must be seen to value it. To foster a culture of innovation you need to hire the right people, promote the value of innovation, put structures in place to foster it and reward innovative behaviour. And at Betfair, we have implemented a range of initiatives.

We schedule a proportion of all IT employees’ time to do research in a topic of their choosing. [*] The only catch is they are asked to give a presentation on their findings at the end of a research week.

The company recently awarded a £10,000 prize to an IT team member who had conceived and delivered an innovative product in their own time. We run a ring-fenced [!??] group in the IT team, called the Advanced Technology Group [**], to ensure we undertake forward-looking, and even speculative, R&D.

We also provide a public showcase for some of the ideas at http://labs.betfair.com. Here, customers can see the sort of things we are looking at, try them out and give us very valuable feedback.

So far, we have achieved some major R&D successes, like the creation of our next-generation transaction processing platform. But one of the big challenges when running an IT R&D team is measuring its effectiveness. We are evolving metrics that look at the quality and impact of our R&D initiatives.