BusinessWeek recently ran an interview with Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. One quote from in particular from Mr. Schmidt caught my eye:

The story of innovation has not changed. It has always been a small team of people who have a new idea, typically not understood by people around them and their executives. [This is] a systematic way of making sure a middle manager does not eliminate that innovation. If you're the employee and I'm the manager, and I sit down and say, "Our product's late, and you screwed up, and you gotta work on this really hard," you can legally say to me, "I will give you everything I've got, 80% of [my time]."

It means the managers can't screw around with the employees beyond some limit. I believe that this innovation escape-valve model is applicable to essentially every business that has technology as a component.

That rings true in every sense and we're looking very closely at how to implement something similar at Cleartrip.

[via SavJag]