By now, most people have heard of Technical Debt; the cost of messy code that grows over time, like interest on an overdue loan. For the last couple of years I’ve been talking at No Fluff Just Stuff conferences about the concept of “Innovation Debt”. I’ve been planning to blog about this for a while. Thanks to Aaron Frost for persuading me to finally write up the post.

Innovation debt is the cost that companies incur when they don’t invest in their developers. It happens when the team is too busy putting out fires and finishing up features to keep up to date with advances in languages, frameworks, libraries, tools and processes. Just as technical debt can kill a code base by turning a green field project into a big ball of mud, innovation debt can kill an engineering team – moving them from a cutting edge crew to a group that’s barely competent to maintain a legacy app. In this post I’ll summarize some of the potential cost of innovation debt and some of the simple steps you can take to ensure your development team doesn’t incur an unsustainable amount.

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