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Initiate's Scotty Awards honor innovation

At Initiate, innovation is one of the core elements of our culture and values. But really, it’s more than that. Like any technology company, innovation is the key to growth. And, like any company, growth is our lifeblood. As Steve Jobs says, “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.”

Initiate has a tradition of honoring innovation with our annual Initiate Employee Innovation Award. This award is affectionately called the “Scotty” in honor of Scott Schumacher, PhD (our Chief Scientist) and Scott Ellard (our original Chief Technology Officer), two of Initiate’s leaders who were also the recipients of the initial awards.

(The Scotty is also named as homage to one of the great innovators of all time, Lt. Commander Montgomery Scott, better known as Scotty, the chief engineer of the Starship Enterprise in Star Trek.)

Every year, Initiate awards Scotty Awards to employees who demonstrate disruptive or sustaining change that increases sales, reduces costs or makes employees and customers happier. The winners are always creative, sometimes unconventional, dramatically effective, and crucial to the resolution of a problem or challenge. The “silver bullet” ideas of Scotty winners have helped make Initiate what it is today.

Periodically, we’ll highlight some of our Scotty winners and their innovations.

One of last year’s winners was Doug Stapp, a staff software engineer based in our Austin office. Doug won a Scotty for introducing one of the most disruptive engine technologies we’ve seen when he prototyped the concept of employing a full-text index in the Initiate engine.

This innovation allows Initiate to completely revise our search capability, making it easier to implement and configure. In doing so, we can now support a wider range of customer search use cases, which greatly enhances the scalability of Initiate software.

Most importantly, Doug’s innovation provides the means for streamlining the future development of our algorithm.

Doug Stapp

Doug is the ultimate professional in his work ethic, productivity and professional relationships. This work clearly sets the tone for re-engineering the Initiate technology from the center out. Upon joining Initiate, Doug very quickly identified this need and worked to make it a reality.

As Doug explained, “To me, innovation is freeing your mind to think outside of the normal paths. It’s that ‘crazy’ idea that people laugh at and then after a moment realize, ‘Why not?’”

Congrats to Doug and his continued success.