I was working with a client recently and one of the managers said they wanted to encourage innovation inside their organization. That sounded good, but as I thought about it, I wasn't sure what this means, or if it's really something that matters. Let's take a few examples and think about this in a modern organization that builds and operates software.

If I am a developer, I get a series of requirements or tickets where I have to write code. Perhaps I need to take inputs from a user, query a database, and produce a result. I might write code in C# 7 instead of C#6. Maybe I'd use a lambda instead of creating a new function. Perhaps I decide to ensure I use the stored procedure type with named parameters rather than submitting SQL as a batch. Is that innovative? It might be a better way to write code and improve the quality (or security or maintainability) of the code, but is it innovation?

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