Celonis Innovation, Technology & Agility

How Side Projects at Celonis Cultivate Creative Thinking

“The main practice we adopted is encouraging side projects. Team members are allowed to dedicate up to 20 percent of their time to working on low-priority side projects. This cultivates ‘out-of-the-box’ thinking by:

• Empowering autonomy and ownership, leading to more engaged and creative problem-solving
• Providing a low-pressure environment to explore new technologies and unconventional solutions
• Encouraging diverse perspectives and the application of novel approaches
• Facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas and the discovery of hidden talents
• Breaking free from routine tasks, promoting fresh and imaginative thinking

This exploration enables our engineers to experiment and learn, leading to more innovative contributions to Celonis.”

 

How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?

Some of the original low-priority projects eventually become high-priority initiatives. For example, we initially started the Duplicate Invoice Checker Assistant as a P2 project, but it recently passed the launch review and entered private preview.

How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture?

We believe this approach is valuable not only for allowing team members to satisfy their curiosity and develop new skills — including working with state-of-the-art technologies — but also for driving innovation and inspiring new projects. Team members also have the opportunity to contribute to initiatives outside the immediate scope of the team by collaborating with colleagues across different areas.