My husband is in the biomedical industry. Certainly technical in nature, but in a very different realm than the software business I’m in at Intuit. He’s technically savvy but doesn’t quite see the usefulness of Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, MySpace, etc. That hasn’t stopped me from exploring and using these apps but we have interesting discussions on their reason for being and how they can possibly be relevant to the work I do.

So imagine the conversation when he starting playing with Cuil and typed in my name, compared to what came up on Google. I have to admit it made me a little uncomfortable that the first several results on Cuil were Twitter related. Really, not that interesting or relevant in the whole scheme of things. Tweets are, in my opinion, only valuable in context and timeliness is important. You learn a lot more about me and what I do just by looking at the first few results on Google. That makes a lot more sense to Chris too, much easier to explain. Hard to argue when his Google results (I’ll save him the public link) reveals all his patent filings. Ugh!

I don’t consider myself a gadget geek or particularly technically savvy and yet I imagine I’m more plugged in than most. It’s kind of an occupational hazard working in the iLab at Intuit. We’re supposed to be on the cutting edge of trends, technology and innovation. As such I’ve experimented with various technologies, particularly mobile ones since I’m in the car far too much, out of the office at customer visits often and have a busy family with two kids so I’m always on the go. I’ve found a few services, tools, apps that really work for me. True I tried most of them because of work but I’ve kept using them because they do make my life easier and more comfortably mobile.

I have a Blackberry Pearl and resisted the urge to activate the email push feature for about a year. I succumbed in January and slowly became obsessed with my crackberry, I de-activated the feature before I went on vacation in July and have been much happier since. In the process I discovered Gmail mobile. I love this. because it keeps me connected to my friends and family away from the office and the computer. although not addicted to the service, SMS is my new love. It helps me stay connected with my husband when he’s traveling in Europe and coordinate easily with babysitters. I regularly use echominder for reminders to myself. Recently my husband sent me a SMS message to be his wake up call in the Netherlands. I created a reminder call in echominder so I’d remember to call him at 9pm Boston time so he’d be up in time for the cab. I haven’t used Quicken Beam yet, my husbands the tracker in the family, but I imagine it would be useful to me since I don’t know where every cent goes like he does. I like the idea of having just a quick view of our balance and last 5 transactions. It would make my decision to impulsively buy a new pair of shoes easier.

I can’t close without mentioning my ipod. It lets me take my music with me, wherever I go and carry pictures of my kids. It’s become such a constant in my car that my kids know to ask if I have it so they can hear their favorite songs, lately that’s Blue October.

I saw this on a bumper sticker the other day and it really resonated with me. I do believe the best things in my life are the relationships I have and the experiences I share with those people. The past few weeks have a been a constant reminder of that truth, oddly enough both at home and at work.

I’ve had the continued pleasure of working with an amazing group of people dedicated to delivering an amazing experience for Intuit customers. They’ve been working long days, into the evening and on weekends to re-launch IntuitLabs. For the readers of the blog and visitors to the site the story isn’t about the re-launch, that’s very meaningful personally to the iLab team and Intuit. But what you really care about, and what I am equally proud of, is that the applications that are now available on the site.

Although they are things, they are really about solving problems, making life easier and generally improving life experiences. The apps you’ll find on IntuitLabs make it easier to connect with people (mobile and social), provide financial peace of mind (personal finance) and take the work out of running (your business). And for the developers, product managers, designers and more who have developed these applications, it’s about the experience of doing something they’re passionate about. And that’s priceless.

It seems counterintuitive to create a program for innovation. True innovation is inspired, spontaneous, creative; not something to be programmed or managed. When you have bright, dedicated, passionate people innovation will happen, but sometimes it needs an extra boost.

We’ve found that in a large organization like Intuit there are things you can do to foster that innovative spirit and provide opportunities for it to thrive. I’ve written about our Idea Jam Sessions which give employees across functions, business units and domain expertise a day to imagine what’s possible and present their ideas, sketches and prototypes for judging. We love the ideas we see at these events, but the best part of the day is the energy. People get excited about their ideas and want to pursue them!

That’s led to the Innovation Development Program. It sounds highly structured and formal, but really it’s an extension of the Idea Jam Session concept. We wanted to reward people who were moving innovation forward at Intuit by giving them 3 months of dedicated time to work on their idea and get it launched on Intuit Labs, for all of you to see.

We had our first rotation participants this fall. Sid Gidwani helped deliver our QuickBooks TimeTracker and Quicken Mobile. Vlad Magdalin worked on an internal app to help innovators across the company build teams and develop their ideas for launch. This month we’re welcoming Mike Power and Bala Dutt. Mike is going to work on a cool mobile payment app and Bala is going to be helping our JumpUp team advance their offering in new, cool ways.

There’ll be more great stuff to come from these guys and others, so stay tuned.

I’ve been wanting to write a post about this topic for a while. I’m taking the leap and keeping my fingers crossed that I don’t step on any toes in doing so.

Intuit hosted it’s third Idea Jam Session last week. This event encourages employees across the various Intuit locations to spend an entire day innovating — conceiving an idea, writing a business plan, or developing code — wherever their passion lies they have the day to explore, create and imagine what’s possible. People come together from across business units, level and functional group to form teams and sprint to the end.

For most teams it’s really the beginning of a journey, but the Idea Jam Session is a kickstart that exposes their ideas to people like Bill Ihrie (SVP, Small Business Product Development), Scott Cook and Brad Smith who are true believers in the power of giving great people with great ideas time and freedom to pursue them.

This was our biggest event so far - people in Bangalore, San Diego, Tucson, Mountain View and Boston, over 300 of them, participated in the event. There were real prizes to win for the best ideas, but it was clear from the energy that, at the end of the day, that this was about more than an award. People were excited to be at the Idea Jam Session, hopeful their ideas would get traction and ultimately land in real users hands back here on Intuit Labs.

Stay tuned - we believe there’s exciting stuff to come.

We’ve been debating as a team internally, engaging our co-workers on this topic for a few weeks now. It occurred to me that we haven’t asked our audience, our community, you, what you’d like to see on the site.

There’s a lot more going on at Intuit than ever reaches our site, do you want to know what those things are? Are you interested in the latest cool features being added to QuickBooks, FREE offers from the company, our efforts on Facebook, mobile experiments, QuickBase Developer Program?

What do you expect to see on this site? What would surprise and delight you to find here?

We talk a lot at Intuit about delighting customers. There’s a strong desire across the company to develop and launch products and services that truly result in a positive emotional response from our customers. It can be about a feature, a support experience, an entire offering, an unexpected WOW that makes our customers fans for life.

I recently read a post on our internal blog about Netflix that Jonathan hopefully will share with all of you. I’m truly a fan of the company and their service and every bit of new information I hear about them further solidifies them in my list of Favorites. I have two quick stories of customer service I’ll share, one positive, one not.

I used Zappos for the first time to order shoes. Free shipping to me and for any return made them a very attractive option. They did two amazing things. Since it was my first purchase they upgraded my shipping to overnight for FREE so I got my new shoes the next day and was delighted. One pair didn’t fit so I went through their easy return process and was able to send them back for nothing. Unfortunately I missed the part where I opted for store credit instead of a credit to my card. I was happy to let it go, sure that I would shop again, but decided to call to see if they could change my decision and give me my money back. ‘Sure, no problem’ was the response. Wow, that was easy.

My less than positive example, actually related to the Zappos story, was in actually shipping the box back to them. I had everything packaged but didn’t have a pouch to put the UPS label in. I went to my friendly, neighborhood store UPS/Mailboxes etc. store to secure the pouch and return the shoes. Apparently they don’t provide those materials and I would have known that if I’d read the sign on the door I was told. But they could tape it directly on the box for me for $1.00. Are you kidding me? Yes, I actually paid $1.00 for the tape that went on the label and box. I didn’t walk out with a roll of tape, just aggravation and annoyance that I had to pay $1.00 for two strips of tape. But as the clerk told me, it’s not her policy, she just works there. Ugh, that made me feel even worse.

And I’m not talking about envy.

There’s lots of talk about being green, doing good things for the environment. We’ve shifted from a topic of conversation, theory and hypotheses to action; real things that people can do to make a difference. Grocery stores are selling reusable grocery bags, TV shows like The Biggest Loser did away with water bottles and are refilling with Brita filtered water. Even big companies like Intuit are printing less and recycling more. We’ve even created a position, Director of Corporate Sustainability, Rupesh Shah, to drive green initiatives.

I’m using reusable grocery bags, refilling my water bottles and recycling whatever I can. But then I go to the dry cleaners and pick up my cleaning covered in plastic bags, it kills me.

So what can you do to make a difference? To leave a better world behind than the one we’ve created now.

I had the privilege of hearing Brad Smith, Intuit’s new CEO, speak to a small group of employees last week. He spoke about the new Intuit Dream, to be a premier innovative growth company. The room was energized, people were smiling, the atmosphere shifted and we were on the edge of our seats. It felt real to every one of us, we know what it means to grow, we know and can immediately identify which companies we think are “innovative”. We want to be on that “short list” as Brad talked about it.

As the iLab talked about it, and remember, innovation is in our name, it struck me that everyone defines innovation differently (scroll down on the linked page to find a definition I like). Instead of looking to ourselves, our leadership and our CEO to give us a definition I wonder what our customers, fans, detractors, doubters and potential customers think about innovation.

What does innovation mean to you? Which companies are innovative? How will Intuit know when we’ve reached our dream or at least made progress? Who better to tell us than you?

Wishing is a powerful, freeing exercise. It’s something we reserve for the young, the naive, the innocent; those who haven’t been jaded by experience and still wonder what is possible.

As an innovative team we spend time wishing, imagining; we have the luxury of exploring the potential, creative world of what might be. We even talk in terms of “I wish…”. It’s that untethered mindset that’s given us great inventions that make life better.

So I wonder, what do you wish Intuit would do? If we did one thing to make your life easier what would it be? If we solved one problem, created a solution for one type of business, fixed one bug, what would be at the top of your list? Imagine anything is possible, you never know until you ask.