4. Be Deliberate About Innovation
It gets much harder to innovate as a company grows larger. One problem is that the threshold goes up dramatically for a new idea to get backing. When a startup only has $1 million per year in revenue, a $100,000 idea represents a significant opportunity. But when the company hits $100 million in revenue, it needs to come up with a $10 million idea to make it worthwhile.

This higher threshold tends to kill new initiatives before they've had time to germinate. That's why so few genuinely new innovations come from the very largest software vendors these days. Yet without innovation any technology firm will die.

Therefore, it is critical to be deliberate about innovation. At RightNow, we've created a separate applied research group to focus on innovation. These individuals are mostly PhDs. They spend their time reviewing all of the new research which comes out of universities worldwide. The result? We now have 18 patents, granted or in process.

True, we still kill off most of the new ideas before they see the light of day. But the research group enables us not only to find new ideas, but to make risk taking and innovation part of our company culture.

5. Find Scalability & Incubate It
It is nice to identify new opportunities, but as a startup grows, it can only take on so many new things. By necessity then, new initiatives must have a significant impact on the company's top line. There must be specific criteria and thresholds of performance which separate the experiments from the new initiatives that will scale and make sense to institutionalize.

For RightNow, one example of these opportunities is voice self-service. We identified a company doing some interesting things with voice automation. Although the offering was embryonic, it succeeded in passing our threshold for attention. Here's why.

We recognize that our mission is to help our customers better serve their customers. Although we were providing great solutions to manage and automate electronic interactions, 60 to 90 percent of all customer interactions were still occurring over the phone. Yet this area of voice automation had received little attention or innovation.

We entered into a partnership with the firm and created a separate group - a "skunkworks" - in the company to develop the voice self-service offering rather than integrating it into the main business. These individuals were responsible for making the product succeed - and they were compensated based on its success. Indeed, when the technology was deployed in the in the marketplace, the results were tremendous. Plus, we were granted a very broad patent for our innovation.

However if we would have mainstreamed the initiative from the beginning, it would likely have floundered. That's because the tolerance for risk-taking in the main business is lower than in the skunkworks. The separate team basically provided us an in-house incubator in which to hatch the new concepts.

Growing from a startup to a grownup is a fascinating process that continually evolves. Software startups that embrace a culture of experimentation and a willingness to reinvent themselves will be the most likely to grow to adulthood.

Greg Gianforte is CEO and founder of RightNow Technologies and author of Bootstrapping Your Business.

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