Our constant advice to anyone who wants to launch a 20 percent project is to start by building a prototype, because that’s how you get people excited about the project. Coming up with an idea is pretty easy. Getting a few of your colleagues to join your project and add their 20 percent time to your 20 percent time is a lot harder. This is where the Darwinian process begins. Finding collaborators can be difficult in a nonhierarchical organization, especially for newcomers, because it’s much harder to figure out where to go to get things done. Relationships become highly critical, and since they
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