Innovator Essays - Niklas Zennstrom/Janus Friis

When Janus Friis and I founded Skype, we were out to shatter the status quo and give people more control over their personal communications. To do so, we needed to create a company spirit that enabled and embodied our commitment to relentless innovation. Maintaining that spirit is a sustained and calculated effort.

Innovation requires a culture of thinkers who look at each challenge as a new opportunity. In its purest form, innovation applies technology to solve a real problem, and our users are our best resources for defining those problems.

We developed Skype to provide new possibilities, dramatically improving a communications system that is more than 100 years old. With broadband becoming ubiquitous and increasing numbers of people gaining access to affordable Wi-Fi, the time was right to unleash a disruptive technology that would let the whole world talk for free.

We developed the original version of the Skype software with about 12 people-none of whom were telecom engineers. We started with a team who could look at a new problem with fresh eyes. We wanted to ensure our developers wouldn't be constrained by old ways of looking at the problem.

User-driven mentality
To create true change, the focus must be on providing new definitions and value, not just competing with a reduced cost for a known commodity. Disruptive companies must provide consumers with ways to enhance their lives, increase their productivity and enable operations to run more efficiently and cost-effectively.

Although it appears that some of the giants have now awoken, true change requires a fast, not a big, company. A lean, efficient company can quickly turn good ideas into new products and services, and be first to market with breakthrough technologies.

Within our organization, this means rewarding risk taking and creative thought. As companies grow, there is a danger in developing a process mentality-which keeps employees mired in bureaucracy-vs. a product mentality, which frees employees to focus on results.

To innovate, you must respect the independence and self-reliance that motivate entrepreneurs. But innovation also requires collaboration. A team needs tools to stay cohesive and to work with trust, allowing them to move quickly and nimbly.

Behind this revolution is a relentless need to innovate at a pace our customers demand. Modern consumers move and adopt at a rate we might not have imagined even 20 years ago.

I have learned to stay humble, and keep fresh ideas flowing, by putting the users at the heart of every new development. Product developments must be prioritized by first asking: What do our users want to see from us?

Unlike many "closed" companies, Skype provides feedback channels to win trust from users and, more important, to meet their needs. Everyday users serve as our beta testers, providing feedback to our team. We even monitor our customer support e-mails to get a broad sense of user needs. We have opened our application programming interface to third parties and independent developers, to inspire products and services that enhance users' experiences and, ultimately, benefit consumers.

Free, open communications
I believe in the open Web and that affordable access to broadband is fundamental to free and transparent communications. This is reflected in the structure of the company itself.

From the outset, we created job structures that span functions and geographical locations. The decentralized nature of our company reflects the decentralized nature of peer-to-peer technology. The power lies in core groups sprinkled in key markets, and how we all link together efficiently under a larger framework.

We also chose our geography very carefully. We knew that placing product development in Estonia would stimulate innovation. Estonia is among the most technologically advanced Eastern European countries, and there is a spirit there that fosters change and advancement. Estonians delight in the openness of the Internet; they don't know borders or boundaries. This is the kind of progressive mind-set that shapes the development of disruptive technologies. This is the mind-set of innovation.