There are some really neat ways to foster action. Here are a couple that I thought you might be interested in.

Get a College Team to Develop an Application – Joel Spolsky has done a great job at FogCreek with what he calls, Project Aardvark. He recruited four Ivy League interns and instead of wasting their talents giving them the usual dull and unimportant tasks of a typical summer internship, we decided to let the interns create a complete new software product, from beginning to end, over the course of one summer. FogCreek now sells this product and has developed a documentary film based on Project Aardvark.

Get a College Team to Develop a Marketing Campaign – The project explained above can be applied to any type of project that has an end goal. This project could be a computer application, marketing campaign, building restoration, office design, etc. Be creative but have a goal with specific deliverables.

Have a One Day Hackathon – What’s a hackathon you ask? Well, all of the engineers (and even some of our “business people”!) showed up in the conference room at 9:00am with ideas for projects that could be designed, implemented, and tested in a single day. We tossed around the ideas for a little while to determine which ones would be the biggest hit with our publishers and by 9:30am everyone left with their assignment: Put everything else on hold and complete their project by the end of the day.

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