The Ippon Formula: A Recipe for Innovation

If you were to boil down Ippon to its raw ingredients, and sifted for what makes us unique and successful, what would you find? We asked some of our clients what made them choose us, and here are some of our most sought after qualities!

Diversity, with shared values

Ippon is proud of our diverse workplace, actively seeking out people of different backgrounds, cultures, and perspectives. This has led to an engineering team of 22% women; 16% more than the industry standard of 6%, according to Stackoverflow’s 2015 developer survey. This is one of our core values– that every person brings a unique vision to their work. Our differences shape our perspectives and add value to both ourselves and, by extension, our company.

As well, we encourage travel! With offices all over the world, we like to allow our engineers to participate in projects at any of our locations. This allows a global perspective, with emphasis on getting to know other cultures.

Globally Local

Whether our office is in Paris, Washington DC, or Richmond Virginia, our programmers are from that area. They’ve been part of that community for years, decades, and some even lifetimes. Personally, I grew up within 20 minutes of the Richmond Ippon office, and I couldn’t be more excited to be part of a company that wants to give back to that community. Whether it’s working with local colleges like VCU to sponsor their senior design projects, giving talks for and sponsoring the Richmond Java Users Group, or simply patroning at local businesses near East Cary, we’re proud of being local.

Big Company of experts, small teams of friends

While we spread throughout the US and globally, we seek to replicate the success we’ve had in the Richmond area– an office of only 22 workers. Though rapidly growing (having doubled in size in 2015), we plan on having a loose cap on the size of any given office. We don’t want to be a group of 500 anonymous engineers, but a team of 50 or so people who know each other well. This allows communication to flow as connections are made within our office and knowledge transfer to happen organically. Every time you have an Ippon engineer on your team, they have access to the Ippon knowledge base.

A Team with Sportsmanship

While every company desires to compete externally, some work cultures want to compete internally as well. While striving for individual success is okay, we at Ippon prefer to succeed together. This fosters friendships between coworkers and combines talents to deliver high quality projects, on time and as promised. Without red tape and office politics, our team is agile, innovative, fast, and just plain good at what we do.

Open Source Contributors

One of the more surprising pieces of feedback is that we contribute to open source projects. Sure, we hear that from students at job fairs and during our senior design expos, but why would a client love that we do this? Quite simply, it’s because of *why *we contribute to the Open Source community: we love what we do, and it shows. We love it so much that we not only contribute to the JHipster Github, we support and talk about this Yeoman generator at local meetups.

We even made our in-house social media software, Tatami, open source as well! Though the majority of the work on it is still done by Ippon programmers and students we sponsor at VCU, we’re proud to say that we invite feedback and contributions from third party and independent sources.

Put it all together

Stepping back from any particular quality, you begin to see the image of the Ippon Engineer: They are technologists with a passion for new and developing innovations, who share their ideas with the open source community, and learn from them as well. Agile and inventive, they create with an emphasis on time-to-market while allowing no sacrifice in quality. They support their teammates while recognizing the value their teammates bring as resources. They love where they are from, but also the world as a whole. They are proud to be Ippon.