Another way to keep sharp, which surely Peter knows (as he runs several meetups in NYC), is to encourage your team to get involved with local meetups, both as a

Another way to keep sharp, which surely Peter knows (as he runs several meetups in NYC), is to encourage your team to get involved with local meetups, both as an attendee and a presenter, or do other community-oriented stuff like teaching classes (e.g. skillshare). This has two positive effects – increases the flow of new ideas, and (when speaking) helps your company / team to get more visibility in the community. While I am very supportive of learning and using cutting edge technologies when it makes sense, it does need to balanced with technical risk assessment, which your post alludes to at the end. For example, say you want to try the Rust language and think it would give you some advantage. Things like maturity / community, etc, definitely come into play. Innovation comes not just from using new technologies, but also from using new techniques with old boring technologies. I’d even argue that working on cutting-edge problems forces you to innovate, alleviating some of the innovation debt issue (not everybody has that issue). You can innovate on nonfunctional areas, such as devops, logging, metrics, etc, if your core business needs to be more conservative. One of the best talks I went to in the last year was by CTO of Etsy, where he talked about how they use “the most boring technologies they can find” – php, mysql, etc. At the same time, Etsy has a very strong reputation in the tech community. http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Etsy http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Etsy