Intuit

While Intuit has not been "the" most innovative tech company that comes to mind in years past, the company is really taking great steps to change the internal culture to focus more on employee-driven innovation rather than top-down mandated innovation.

In the past year or so, Intuit has rolled out quarterly innovation contests and ways for all employees to submit and craft new business ideas. Employees are also given 10% "unstructured time" to work on whatever they want, which is a huge factor for people actually caring about ideas and having some time to get them off the ground.

There are many situations where off-the-cuff ideas have made it into the market, and employees have gone on to work on them full-time after starting in their 10% time.

Also, the benefits are amazing, and the pay is quite competitive.

The compensation is perhaps not as high as next-door neighbor Google, and the "coolness" factor is much lower (we have no bikes with flags and funny umbrellas all over the place).

The employees as a whole are pretty middle-aged, but there's been a large recent influx over the last 3 years after a heavier focus on a college recruiting program that has new employees try out several positions before choosing their final one.

There have been layoffs, but I've only known one person affected.

Also, there is still a lot of entrenched management that don't quite care about the 10% time and innovation, and see it more as a barrier to their specific business goals than an overall boost for generating new ideas for the company.

Keep doing what you're doing with innovation, but put more money where your mouth is.

I know that's hard in this current economic environment, but I believe you have to invest to grow, and some of our products are probably going the way of the dodo eventually (maybe Quicken, Real Estate stuff, etc).

Get with the web, too. FreshBooks is whipping our butt, and technically they are much less featured but more expensive than QuickBooks. What gives?