SAN FRANCISCO — Adobe Systems' Mark Randall believes in failure.
Not abject failure or crash-and-burn miscues, but calculated risks outside the corporate norm that come from employee ranks. The kind of shoot-for-the-sky stuff that can result in an improved music sync feature for a mobile app or an upgrade to Photoshop, the photo-editing software.
Those were two of the outcomes of Kickbox, a nearly 4-year-old program at Adobe that encourages the rank and file to develop ideas with a $1,000 prepaid credit card to fund their project free of expense reports or approvals.
So far, 1,600 employees at the Silicon Valley software company have participated and several other companies and organizations — including Cisco Systems, the United Nations and DARPA — have adopted Kickbox.
"A large company is really (attention deficit disorder); it's pulled in so many different directions," Randall, chief strategist and vice president of creativity digital media at Adobe, said in an interview at USA TODAY's San Francisco bureau on Thursday. "It has resources, but the challenge is in cultivating ideas."
Randall, architect and head of the Kickbox program, will discuss it in detail as keynote speaker at the One Nation: American Innovation event, co-hosted by USA TODAY and FLORIDA TODAY, on July 13 at Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Randall, who came to Adobe nearly a decade ago when it acquired his start-up Serious Magic, a maker of video software and communications tools, in late 2006, refers to the Kickbox concept as an example of "employee empowerment."
And, in an era when Elon Musk rules over tech as its Tony Stark with Tesla Motors, SolarCity, SpaceX and Hyperloop, more established companies like desktop-publishing pioneer Adobe (founded in 1982) are embracing a bottom-up, start-up philosophy, according to Randall.
"The failure rate is not high enough at large companies," says Randall, an advocate of grass-roots, collaborative projects. "They need to erect lighting rods" to attract new ideas from employees.
If they fail to risk failure, he warns, companies run the risk of becoming the next Kodak.
"Kodak was the Google of its era, and it made the transition to digital," Randall says. "But you also need to make the leap to business and culture. It didn't."
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