One of the things I like most about the innovation token metaphor is that it works much better as a money metaphor than, say, technical debt. Technical debt is a spurious metaphor, one that only makes sense when compared to a very specific financial context that is largely divorced from the average person’s household finances. This makes it pretty tough to come up with a shared context for talking about technical debt (and why I prefer terms like Chelsea Troy’s Maintenance Load).
In contrast, innovation tokens actually work pretty well as a money metaphor, at least as far as affecting the reputation of a project/technical lead goes. A Senior Architect is unwilling to spend any innovation tokens at all? They’re going to be seen as miserly, same as if they refused to spend money. Someone spends all of their innovations tokens and then some on a resume project? They’ll likely have the same sentiments attached to their reputation as someone who flippantly spends money that they don’t have.
It even works in more subtle cases: someone can spend one innovation token and get very luck on it, thereby giving them leeway to spend an outsized number, regardless of their ability to do so wisely. At many companies, there’s the equivalent of an innovation token Warren Buffet, someone who has had the right combination of luck and skillful investment of their tokens that they essentially have access to infinite tokens now. And of course, those that come into a company with the blessing of nepotism will inherit several innovation tokens.
The one place that innovation tokens as a money metaphor breaks down, even more than technical debt, is that you can’t really transfer them. A team can very easily transfer its technical debt to another team, but it’s much more nebulous what transferring innovation tokens means. “I’m going to take a more cautious approach so that $other_team can try something new” isn’t really something I’ve ever heard before, nor does it make a ton of sense.
One thing to note here is that I’m using innovation tokens slightly outside of its original context. The original essay about them says: “let’s say every company gets about three innovation tokens. You can spend these however you want, but the supply is fixed for a long while. You might get a few more after you achieve a certain level of stability and maturity…” In my experience, innovation tokens in larger companies aren’t necessarily a pot shared by the entire company, but divided into pools among various parts of the engineering organization. When someone comes up with a new technical design for a project, they utilize some of that pool, and access to that pool is like access to credit. Which, come to think of it, is yet another way in which innovation tokens are a better money metaphor than technical debt.