Every once in a while we need to get out of the office together as a team in order to get closer and think about the future. A few Fridays ago, Nextiny decided to head to Selby Botanical Gardens in order to clear our minds, get away from the day to day activities, and innovate. This year at Innovation Day, we talked about the future of marketing software, the impact of AI in the future, and much more.
With most of our days spent inside the office, it’s easy to forget that we live in such a scenic location here in Sarasota. It’s good to step outside, pull ourselves away from the computer, and enjoy everything around us.
Innovation Day is a chance to do just that. Everyone gets together to grow closer as a team and outline our goals. We think it’s important to step away from the day to day activities of a workweek every once in a while because it allows us to look at the bigger picture, think about how far we’ve come, and realize how far we can still go.
At our last Innovation Day, we talked about the future of marketing software, the impact AI will have, drones, and how each and every one of us can innovate in our individual roles.
What is innovation? For us, it’s all about thinking about the future. But we don’t limit ourselves to the scale of our office, we want to think bigger.
That’s why we took the day to walk through the wonders of the garden, to see the beauty around us from the plants and animals to the wide open Sarasota Bay. We live in one of the most naturally beautiful places in the country and a walk through Selby’s celebration of nature only makes that more apparent. The closer you get to it, the more you realize that we’re all connected through nature, and we’re all responsible for its well-being.
“The Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.”
- Chief Seattle
Like the plants around us, we never want to stop growing, both as a company and as people, which drives us to innovate. But growth should be sustainable. Innovation is important because it gets you thinking; about the future of our business, the future of our agency and, eventually, the fate of humanity itself. That may sound melodramatic, but it’s something we want to be thinking about constantly. So we decided that’s exactly what we’re going to do.
Our afternoon under the Florida sunshine has given us a new perspective on what we can do to sustain the world around us. We’ve seen it first-hand here in Florida with the recent storms, Hurricane Irma and Michael, and this year with the red tide epidemic. We want to adapt, change, and improve ourselves to help maintain a healthy environment.
Sarasota’s commitment to 100% renewable energy has inspired us to follow their lead. And with what we’ve seen and Earth Day coming up, we’ve decided to work our way toward becoming a fully sustainable agency and we encourage everyone to join us.
Becoming environmentally friendly can be challenging and require a lot of changes, including things you’ve been doing for a long time and didn’t even know were causing harm.
For example, the chemicals in your pesticides or herbicides could be causing the dwindling numbers for Monarch Butterflies or Honeybees and even health issues for yourself.
There are many things to consider. Here’s a list of the things we’ve done in the past couple of years, both at home and the office, to help you develop your own list:
These are just a scratch on the surface of what we can do to help, and it’s an ever-growing list. We are continuing to learn more about new things we can do to add to it. What types of things are you or your business doing to help? Is there anything not on the list we should be doing? Let us know in the comments below. We’d love to hear from you all and learn more and more about new ways to increase our efforts.
Innovation day has helped us to think differently about our agency and our work, but most importantly it’s found us thinking about things bigger than anything like that.
There are plenty of little things we can do every day to help make a big difference, but one of the biggest things you can do is to spread the word that we can’t all sit back and let others tackle these problems anymore. It’s time to take matters into our own hands. We’re trying to to do our part, and we hope you’ll do the same.