Vercel's weekly demo days are not a competition but a congratulatory showcase where anyone can present an idea. This positive reinforcement encourages working in the open, attracting collaborators organically and creating a low-stakes environment for new projects to evolve.

To truly integrate AI, go beyond simply telling your team to "learn more." The founder of Search Atlas advocates for organizing multi-day, in-person hackathons. This focused, collaborative environment, where teams tackle specific problems together, fosters a deeper and faster mastery of practical AI applications than solo, online efforts can achieve.

At Inrix's Innovation Week, an unwritten rule dictates that the most junior team members present the final project. This practice intentionally gives high-visibility opportunities to employees, including interns, who wouldn't typically present at company-wide meetings, fostering growth and recognizing talent at all levels.

Inrix's entire campus recruiting strategy is built around sponsoring university hackathons. Instead of cash, the prize for winning teams is a final-round job interview. This allows the company to bypass resume screening and directly identify and hire top student talent based on demonstrated skill and teamwork.

Dara Khosrowshahi describes a two-step innovation process. First, let teams compete to rapidly "hack" a solution and find product-market fit. Second, once a winner emerges, the organization must systematize and automate that solution through engineering to make it scalable and part of the core platform.

Inrix's Innovation Week goes beyond typical partner support by inviting vendors like AWS to not only assist teams but also pitch their own ideas and compete. This turns partners into active participants, giving them firsthand insight into product usage and fostering a stronger, more collaborative relationship.

Siphoning off cutting-edge work to a separate 'labs' group demotivates core teams and disconnects innovation from those who own the customer. Instead, foster 'innovating teams' by making innovation the responsibility of the core product teams themselves.

To capitalize on the rapid progress enabled by AI, Inrix created "Implementation Week" following its hackathon. This dedicated time allows teams to immediately push projects that are 80-100% complete over the finish line, bridging the common gap between innovative ideas and actual product shipment.

Flexport's internal hackathons are now its primary source for AI-driven innovation. With 90% of projects using LLMs, these events generate real product features and influence the company's roadmap. This demonstrates a powerful bottom-up approach where the most valuable ideas come from engineers closest to the problems.