I own a bike here in India, the Royal Enfield Bullet. The apartment I live in provides each tenant with a (car sized) parking lot. So my bike spends quite a bit of time next to an Innova van owned by a business man.

The sheer number of people in India makes labour really cheap. Not to have a maid for house keeping is rare. Even employing a maid, a cook and a driver does not raise many eyebrows when you're in the middle management.

While I have none of those yet, the gentleman owning the Innova does employ a driver. The driver also washes the car every other day. That guy is a nice fellow and although his English is really bad, we're greeting each other and have a three half-sentence long chat every now and then.

My experience I'd like to share started on the day where he started washing my bike.

I didn't ask for it and the bike was not in a state that implies he washed it out of pure mercy. He also didn't ask for money. I thanked him and that was it. I was happy to have a clean bike and he smiled even brighter after I thanked him. From that day on he washed the bike a couple of times.

I don't know if he is a marketing genius that just happened to be a driver or if he's just being friendly. No matter which, this week I suggested that we can come to a simple agreement: He washes my bike two times a week and I pay him. That'd save me time better spent elsewhere and helps him financially - as I said labour is cheap, a driver is far from rich.

Whatever his intentions were when he started this, he's making a bit of money out of it now.

Transfered to the online business I'm familiar with something similar. Every now and then we develop a cool feature internally and show a beta to our clients - RnD, idle time, crazy idea turned useful, there are many reasons how that starts. If the clients are interested we calculate a price partially covering our costs and sell it to them on a non-exclusive base. Usually that works out.

I can think of at least one big company which is doing something similar: Google

For them the motivation is different, they don't charge a fee when the product gets out of beta. For them it is marketing. People love Google. Sometimes I'm surprised there is no Google religion yet.

Of course the early release of betas also enables Google (and us) to test the demand for a certain feature and thus cut development costs to a minimum if there is none.

The early feedback aside I'm convinced the major benefit of these free gifts is marketing and the chance of generating future, unrelated business out of it.

The good part: The development of these betas is almost free of cost, even if no clients buy it. Quite often I see these features are developed In someone's spare time or as a distraction from work. So no real harm done. A happy developer working overtime even without you asking for it is as close to perfection as it gets.

So encourage your team to do RnD, to check upon latest trends and to do something cool, even if it is out of scope. Chances are that the topics he learns about during that RnD will be useful in a future project.

Even more important: Let RnD be lean! Don't muffle creativity with an "innovation budget approval" process or something even worse.

Software is an art form! Leave your artists some creative space. It will pay off.

As always, I'm curious. Did you encounter something similar? Share your thoughts in the comments!