At INRIX, innovation isn’t something we take lightly. It is part of our DNA.
For one week, the whole company pauses day-to-day work schedule, cancelling all meetings, to focus on our annual Innovation Week. As CEO Bryan Mistele explains:
“From pioneering the use of GPS signals for creating traffic, to the first traffic app for a smartphone, to the first digital connected car service, to INRIX Signal Analytics, to now INRIX IQ — we’ve always succeeded by creating new, innovative products that moved the market. This is why we do Innovation Week – to take a little time off to focus on both internal and new product (external) innovation.”
Innovation Week isn’t just about creating new products. It’s a chance for teams to learn new technologies, collaborate with colleagues they have never worked with before, and think outside the box.
How Innovation Week Fosters Creativity and Collaboration
INRIX started Innovation Week in 2022, and what began as an experiment has now become a cornerstone of our company’s culture. A weeklong event that embodies our commitment to continuous improvement and creative exploration. And it’s not just for engineers or product teams. Everyone participates, from HR to finance, from marketing to sales, remote, and in office. Every department has the opportunity to explore a new product or idea or improve something internally. It’s even celebrated to collaborate on different teams than your normal team and to challenge yourself to experiment with things that are not used in your day-to-day work; to learn a new CRM, product, or platform.
This year, we kicked things off with company-wide brainstorming sessions, encouraging everyone to think bigger, leverage cross-functional expertise, and pursue bold ideas. The response was incredible: 47 ideas were submitted, far more than we could execute in a single week!
The best part of Innovation Week is seeing how ideas evolve into real business impact. Every year, we review all projects and evaluate their potential for inclusion in the product and engineering roadmaps.
Historically, 50–70% of Innovation Week ideas have found their way into development pipelines, with some becoming full-fledged products within months. One particularly exciting concept from our very first Innovation Week recently materialized into three production-ready algorithms released earlier this year, a testament to the long-term power of innovation.
Collaborating Beyond INRIX
For the past three years, we’ve proudly partnered with AWS, whose engineers join our teams. Their guidance and technical support help participants maximize what they can accomplish in just a few days. This year, AWS even entered their own team, using AWS technologies to analyze INRIX and open-source mobility data.
Innovation Week 2025 Highlights
This year’s event featured 24 delivering completed projects by week’s end. Compared to past years, there was a noticeable rise in projects aimed at improving internal processes and tools; many led by non-technical teams innovating their everyday challenges.
On the technical front, AI took center stage. Many teams, supported by AWS, leveraged generative AI tools and intelligent agents to build smarter prototypes, generate collateral, and even automate parts of their presentations, like creating a video. This marks a major milestone in our ongoing journey to integrate AI into both our products and our internal workflows. We also saw a significant increase in cross-geographical collaboration, with teams spread across time zones working to deliver results.
There were four awards to recognize excellence and collaboration:
- People’s Choice Award – Voted by all participants.
- Most Innovative Project – Selected by judges, with bonus points for cross-functional teamwork.
- Project with the Most Business Value – Awarded by judges, also with collaboration bonuses.
- Best Implementation – Recognizing the strongest technical execution.
Key Takeaways
Innovation Week once again reinforced the culture of curiosity and collaboration at INRIX. AI continues to move to the forefront of everything we do, and this year’s projects demonstrated how deeply that mindset has spread across the organization.
Perhaps most inspiring: a record number of teams delivered nearly production-ready solutions within the week. This momentum is driving us to refine how we transition Innovation Week projects into live products and internal tools faster than ever before.
Looking Ahead
Given the success of this year’s event, we plan to take it even further by inviting selected partners and customers to collaborate with us on the next wave of ambitious and innovative projects. Their perspectives and expertise will help us accelerate innovation and deepen collaboration across our ecosystem. As we want to expand Innovation Week, we have also discovered a want for Implementation Week. As most of these ideas are close to the finish line, we want to give teams the opportunity to go the extra mile and implement them. Early in 2026, we will have another week in which the office will pause, and we will implement some of these great concepts and products and get them into production.