Red Hat Open Innovation Labs

The inner workings of a global open innovation team

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What we do

We provide a number of services-based products to Red Hat customers with a mission to accelerate delivery of their innovative ideas, and create infectious enthusiasm for building applications the Red Hat way, by leveraging community-powered innovation to deliver an outstanding labs experience. With these offerings our overall vision is to empower our customers to deliver the most innovative software success stories of the 21st century.

Our flagship product is called the Labs Residency - a 4-12 week timeboxed, immersive engagement.

To support our customers on their journeys, we also provide enabling products to customers including DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement TL500.

Open Innovation Labs provides internal capability and enablement to evolve the way Red Hat delivers and to bring new practices to our Consultants’ way of working using:

  • DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement
  • Open Leadership training and coaching
  • Site Reliability Engineering enablement
  • Maintenance of the platform tools including the Open Practice Library, LodeStar and Ubiquitous Journey
  • Contributing to and supporting Red Hat’s Communities of Practice
  • Running experiments to improve delivery capability
  • Providing internal strategy consultants

What is a Labs Residency?

A transformational Red Hat Services format led by Open Innovation Labs, focused on inspiring change in organizations on the path of adopting DevOps mindset and building long-lived, cross-functional product teams using Red Hat technology.

Engagements are focused on all of the following:

  • Achieving business outcomes (through the development of a concrete product)
  • Forming product teams
  • Establishing DevOps culture and a cloud-native organization

i.e. Product Teams achieving business outcomes through living DevOps culture while developing an important product (application, platform, etc.)

Who is a Labs Residency best suited for?

The Labs Residency product is for people who are change-makers, transformational or visionary leaders.

They believe that their organizations need to change the way products are built.

They believe a project approach is inappropriate for building products and that the best technology requires a mindset change as much as process change and new ways of working.

We focus on people who want to transform their organizations or are already transforming them. People who understand that change requires new and open leadership styles. Moreover people who are ready to build and lead a wide community in order to scale the change beyond the single team.

Engaging with Open Innovation Labs will help those people by:

  • Providing a proof point and an example of how teams can be formed, enabled and motivated in a different way, which results in better and faster time-to-market for a concrete product
  • Providing a way to measure outcomes and a repeatable framework for metrics-driven improvements
  • Showing how leading with intent and focus on outcomes (rather than outputs) deliver tangible business impacts along with a more engaged team
  • Serving as inspiration on how an open organization, based on open source principles creates innovation in technology

Organizations where the following is present/true are particularly well suited:

  • Targeting to modernize their workforce to move to cloud native development using Agile, DevOps, Design Thinking, Lean Product Development
  • Engagement with Business line sponsorship
  • Insourced/Insourcing - Aim to form or has formed a developer/infrastructure team that will take ownership of the future “platform”/artifacts/products
  • Aim for a platform that will continue growing after we leave
  • Struggling to innovate/ speed to market needs to improve/ facing a highly disruptive/ regulated market

… with Leaders who:

  • A bold and strong leader advocating for true BizDevOps culture and change
  • Ambition for adoption of cloud native development and/or IT automation adoption
  • Available & allocated transformation budget of which 200k+ can be allocated for forming a first example of a cross-functional product team
  • Red Hat technology adoption recognized as critical for their success
  • Want a proof point to make the case for wider adoption of Agile/ DevOps methods

What are the unique features of a Labs Residency?

Differentiating unique features as opposed to other alternatives which customers could consider:

  • Our purpose is to enable our customers to retain their independence
  • Open Organization Culture & Open Leadership
  • A sticky open source Product Development Framework (Möbius Loop) recognized by Agile and product management thought leaders across the globe
  • Open Innovation & Co-innovation on a significant business challenge
  • Open Source Technology
  • 1-on-1 matching & collaboration of customer’s team with the best of Red Hat architects & engineers
  • Software leadership in hybrid cloud, containers, automation, MW - the full stack for cloud native development

What is DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement

DevOps Culture and Practice Enablement TL500 is a five day, immersive class offering students an opportunity to experience and implement cultural shifts that are utilized in many successful DevOps adoption journeys. Many agile training offerings focus on a particular framework, delivery mechanism or technology. Instead, DevOps Culture & Practice combines the best tools from many leading frameworks to blend continuous discovery and continuous delivery together with cultural and technical practices. The result is a unique, highly engaging experience simulating real-world scenarios and applications.

To achieve the learning objectives, participation should include multiple roles from an organization. Business product owners, architects, developers, and site reliability engineers will gain the experience of working outside of their traditional silos. The daily routine simulates a real-world delivery team, where cross-functional teams learn how collaboration breeds innovation. Armed with shared experiences and best practices, the team can apply what it has learned to benefit the Department’s culture and mission success in the pursuit of new projects and improved processes.