From “Shark Tank” style competitions to hackathons and book clubs — engineering teams have a certain swagger when it comes to rituals that promote innovation.
But for some teams, innovation starts with the connections on the team, like at SRAM where at lunch time you might see engineers on a bike ride along Lake Michigan together or hosting a pop-up repair fair.
“Some of our electrical test engineers occasionally hold open office hours for an ‘electronics repair clinic,’ where anyone from SRAM can bring a device that needs fixing,” Cara Ditmar, embedded software engineer at SRAM, said. “With the help of a few knowledgeable engineers, my malfunctioning vinyl turntable was back up and running in under an hour!”
But it’s not just about competitions or making time to connect with co-workers — although that’s part of it. High-performance teams also thrive when they value innovation, taking risks and allow teammates to speak their minds.
“Innovation has brought a whole new rhythm to our team culture,” Dino Eliopulos, vice president of innovation and solutions at Fulcrum GT, said. “For me, it’s like jazz — we give people space to riff, explore and improvise… That sense of creative freedom paired with clear structure is what keeps our culture sharp, supportive and fun.”
Built In spoke with five Chicago tech leaders to see what cultures of innovation look like on their teams.
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Fulcrum GT provides an innovative end-to-end digital business platform for the legal and professional services markets.
What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
At Fulcrum GT, innovation isn’t a side hustle; it’s how we work. One of our biggest engines is Startup Camp, our in-house incubator where teams get time, support and leadership buy-in to take bold ideas from concept to prototype. Think “Shark Tank” meets agile. Several major features like real-time sanctions screening and our New Business Intake product were born there and now power key client workflows.
We also run focused Innovation Sprints to de-risk ambitious ideas and explore emerging tech, layering them directly into our Orchestrated Agile process. That means R&D checkpoints, prototyping and iterative client feedback are built into how we ship. Add in design jams, side project support and tech deep-dives during lunch-and-learns and our teams stay energized, experimental and grounded in solving real problems. Startup Camp turns bold ideas into live features and even new businesses. Innovation Sprints accelerate and de-risk new tech. Orchestrated Agile bakes R&D into the delivery process. And our culture supports side projects, client co-innovation and cross-team creativity.
How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
Innovation has measurably improved the quality of our work across the board. After one of our Innovation Sprints focused on test automation, we rolled out a fully integrated regression suite that cut hotfixes by more than half — a huge win for stability and speed. Startup Camp teams also built our AI-powered onboarding tool, which now helps clients get up and running faster and more accurately than ever.
But it goes deeper than just tools. Orchestrated Agile is built for innovation: we integrate R&D sprints, feedback loops, prototyping and change-readiness planning directly into our sprints. This means teams aren’t just reacting to requirements — they’re iterating on them, validating with users and improving continuously. It’s a process that keeps our engineers creative, accountable and ahead of the curve. Innovation-led automation reduced hot-fixes by half. Orchestrated Agile embeds R&D and real-world feedback.
How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
Innovation has brought a whole new rhythm to our team culture. For me, it’s like jazz — we give people space to riff, explore and improvise whether it’s during Startup Camp, Innovation Sprints or even off-cycle side projects. There’s a deep respect for experimentation. But the magic really happens when that raw creative energy meets structure. Orchestrated Agile takes those “improvisations” and helps turn them into full ensemble performances — scalable, secure, compliant and enterprise-ready.
Just like jazz evolved into big-band and symphonic arrangements without losing its soul, our teams learn to build repeatable processes around innovation without dulling the creative edge. It gives everyone, from junior devs to principal architects, permission to stretch their thinking while trusting that there’s a pathway to production. That sense of creative freedom paired with clear structure is what keeps our culture sharp, supportive and fun. People bond over shared breakthroughs and the journey from napkin sketch to client release becomes something we celebrate together.
The OpenFox Suite supplies a network for federal & state agencies to manage and share criminal data.
What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
Prototyping and proving concepts are regular exercises at CPI. We love testing the boundaries of new technologies while learning how they can be integrated and add to the value of our solutions. Ideas come to us from all over the organization and from our customers, too.
We host an annual training week and most years that includes representatives from nearly every CPI customer. This week includes a set of interactive sessions intentionally focused on collaboration between customers and CPI. We talk about our industry’s changing needs, technology’s changing landscape and challenges that face our partners. Engineers are often leading these conversations, but teammates from our project management office and sales organizations are keeping tabs of every thought that comes from these sessions and leading subsequent sessions internally to determine which of these ideas we pursue.
Many of those conversations give us the ideas that we bring to the design brain-storms and proof-of-concept work, so that innovation is fed by both technical concepts, but also practical application straight from our customers.
How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
The quality of work from our engineering teams is always improved through innovation. Some of the best examples of this are found in shared services where one simple idea, carefully crafted and applied, has led to some of CPI’s most impactful solutions. NCISync is a patented solution for keeping in-state law enforcement data fully up to date with the FBI’s national data systems. This solution has an amazing track record of solving some of the more challenging needs that our customers have while having a near-flawless internal quality score. Our test automation strategy took an innovative approach to addressing an incredibly complex combination of features in CPI’s computerized criminal history solution.
Each of our customers have various workflows and legal requirements when it comes to records management and the ways that each state’s laws are applied. Being able to test a single application with hundreds of feature variations has facilitated a significant improvement in the overall quality of the solution by enabling much more frequent regression testing and identifying issues even in the most obscure configured implementation.
How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
Sessions focused on innovation seem to attract the most attention and positivity from our engineering teams. Almost every engineer I have ever worked with has had a stronger affinity to solving new problems with new technology compared to resolving the same issues over and over caused by an outdated tech stack. Innovation and fresh thinking fosters growth.
Innovation and new technology puts everyone on a level playing field where, often, even subject matter experts and technology aficionados are starting from scratch just like a new hire or a junior developer. An even playing field really draws each individual’s competitive nature out and highlights aptitude, which is, in my opinion, the most important attribute that any engineer can have.
Innovation allows for wild ideas that completely disregard the traditional walls of “the box” and even thrives in failure because everything is new and, therefore, every path has a lesson to be learned. Culturally, this breeds excitement in every level of our organization from the individual junior engineer all the way to the owners of our company, who are all engineers too and absolutely love to see our latest ideas come to life.
SRAM is a leading manufacturer of high-performance bicycle components and accessories, designed for cyclists of all levels.
What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
On the more technical side of things, we have group activities such as an engineering book club, in which team members read about and discuss various engineering topics. Every few weeks, we also have a department-wide demo where team members showcase their recent progress. This has been a great way for me to learn about the various projects happening in parallel within our department.
Some of our electrical test engineers occasionally hold open office hours for an electronics repair clinic, where anyone from SRAM can bring a device that needs fixing. With the help of a few knowledgeable engineers, my malfunctioning vinyl turntable was back up and running in under an hour!
Outside of technical practices, lunch-and-learns are an opportunity for less avid cyclists to learn more about city biking, bike maintenance and proper bike fit from our more experienced riders. When the weather is nice, we use our new skills to enjoy team lunch bike rides along Lake Michigan.
Innovative group activities have helped our team feel more comfortable collaborating and communicating, which carries over into our professional tasks as well. And as a bonus, they make the office a fun place to be!
How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
Engineering teams at SRAM have to solve unique challenges due to the interdisciplinary nature of our products. Oftentimes, a problem can’t be solved by just one engineer, or even just one department! Our work requires close collaboration between different teams of engineers (electrical, software, mechanical, industrial, you name it) operating across multiple time zones.
If we want to implement a new feature into one of our components, we must zoom out and consider: What aspects of the component will this affect? Its software? Hardware? Our mobile app? (Usually, the answer is all of the above). This requires us to assemble members from every team involved to make sure we’re aligned on the goals and risks of the project. What starts as a simple feature request can turn into a multi-departmental effort.
Our ongoing focus on building team rapport and collaboration makes this type of cross-functional work possible. Having an open line of communication between teams removes the barrier that often comes with asking for help. And as a result, we aren’t afraid to suggest new ideas or bring in new perspectives — which has led to some of our most exciting products.
How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
SRAM is made up of some of the most creative and passionate people I know. I am constantly learning from my fellow team members in areas ranging from embedded systems to art to home improvement. And in doing so, I have discovered new passions of my own! One of our team members even started a lunchtime “SRAM Show and Tell” event as a platform for co-workers to learn more about each other’s hobbies outside of the office.
I think all my fellow team members would agree that our collaborations are as educational as they are enjoyable. The more we grow as a team, the easier it is to brainstorm, problem-solve and dream up our next innovative project.
Whether it’s by joining some friends for a lunchtime run, asking for new music recommendations, or simply grabbing a donut in the cafeteria to celebrate a new product launch, I have really enjoyed getting to know my teammates both as co-workers and as friends.
Grainger is a distributor of maintenance, repair and operating products, serving more than 4.5 million customers worldwide.
What practices does your team employ to foster innovation?
One of Grainger’s company principles is to embrace curiosity. This value is encouraged at the companywide level and put in practice by teams across the organization. On the machine learning side, we’re encouraged at a company level to attend conferences to expand our knowledge base, share insights when applicable and network with others in the industry.
At a team level, we host all-hands meetings, journal clubs to discuss research papers about emerging technologies and biweekly demos both on applicable solutions and new technology functionality.
Finally, within my team, as an effort to promote personal development while also aligning to team goals, we build in time during our working hours to learn. Personal development learning could include diving deeper into research papers, exploring new solutions, learning about new technology, etc.
With such a cross-collaborative team that takes the time to learn with and from one another, I feel we are better able to gain new perspectives that help us find the best solutions to meet our customer needs. People — customers or team members — are at the center of our work, and brainstorming, networking and conversing with peers often paves the way to the best solution we can find to solve our problem.
How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
I’ve been in a manager role for about two years, and I feel that the knowledge we share with one another allows us to be creative in identifying a solution, while also remaining focused on our business objectives.
A key Grainger principle is to win as one team, and the cross-collaborative elements of our team do exactly that. Presentations, journal sharing, demos, etc., stimulate us to design multiple innovative solutions that may solve the problem, all while building confidence in our team members to feel comfortable sharing their ideas. Creating a psychologically safe environment where team members feel they can have influence, even if it’s not directly the solution, allows us to get a full scope of a problem, and identify pros and cons to a solution. It’s often in these brainstorming sessions where we can best understand the pain-points of a customer and help discover the root of a problem.
One example of how we do this is by hosting an annual Grainger hack-a-thons where teams participate in creating innovative prototypes to solve a business case. Learning in this way makes us stronger engineers and encourages out-of-the-box thinking. Sometimes we come up with applications that may solve another problem entirely.
How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
A focus on innovation has allowed our teams to bond more. We take the time to listen to unique perspectives on a solution and try to see through other eyes how a team member’s background or industry knowledge may make them approach a solution differently. Having this understanding of how others think allows us to make better decisions. Cyclically, when we’re able to understand each other better and spend time getting comfortable ideating, we feel encouraged and comfortable to share more. This mentality is already enmeshed in our culture, as we’re encouraged to in as one team, through the Grainger Edge principles, driving us to share ideas, cross-collaborate and feel like we can rely on one another.
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Bectran provides finance departments with a companion toolkit of software to help cut costs and reduce risk.
What practices does your team employ to foster innovation? How have these practices led to more creative, out-of-the-box thinking?
Our team fosters innovative and creative thinking by constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible — whether it’s reimagining architecture designs or building tools that the market hasn’t seen yet. We dedicate time to explore complex problems through internal hackathons, technical deep dives and brainstorming sessions that challenge current processes.
Technical excellence is something we invest in heavily — not just by reading the industry standard O’Reilly or Manning books, but by turning those insights into action. If someone discovers a better way of solving a challenge, it’s shared, debated and often implemented across the board. What truly sets us apart is our obsession with real-world impact. To achieve this, we stay in close contact with our customers and product teams — co-creating solutions alongside them. That level of engagement fuels unconventional thinking and helps us overcome roadblocks in creative ways.
How has a focus on innovation increased the quality of your team’s work?
By constantly changing how we approach and think about new challenges, we’ve elevated the quality of our work in more ways than just how we build. Through encouraging experimentation and rewarding out-of-the-box thinking, we’ve seen a noticeable difference in our delivery — code is cleaner, systems are more resilient and solutions are delivered faster. We also catch issues earlier because our team questions assumptions and challenges one another.
Collaboration also plays a big role in our process; we leverage our combined expertise to build scalable, user-focused products that exceed our customers’ needs. Our shared ambition to always innovate drives us to challenge industry standards and consistently improve the quality of the solutions we deliver. Overall, innovative thinking has made our work sharper, faster and more impactful — because when people are empowered to think differently, they build differently.
How has a focus on innovation bolstered your team’s culture? Do these different practices give team members greater chances to bond and have fun?
The pursuit of innovative ideas has democratized how we work. For our team, it doesn’t matter if you’re a senior or a new hire because everyone gets opportunities to lead real impact. We promote a merit-based environment where the best ideas rise and risk-taking is seen as a strength. Our focus on innovation has completely transformed our team culture, it’s what brings us together, fuels our momentum and raises the quality of everything we do. We’ve built a culture where everyone is energized by the same goal — creating solutions that make a difference. That shared purpose creates camaraderie within our team and motivates us to push new boundaries.
