Fresh Takes on Innovation

When discussing innovative companies today, the name Google just has to be mentioned. Google’s innovations seem to be endless – behind the well-known and often glorified innovative culture, the company is promoting various processes and structures leading to the renowned “innovation culture”. Planning, organization, discipline and a hierarchic management, as well as strategic acquisitions, are giving Google the fast and strong innovation character known today.
Jim Lecinski, managing director of Google, listed 9 key factors in Google’s innovation strategy:

1. Innovations have to be developed constantly, instant perfection is not required. New products and ideas should be launched early, rather than trying to perfect ideas behind closed doors for years before releasing them to the public.

2. Communication. Small teams that communicate freely have provided the best results. Transparency in the workplace is the key so that everyone knows what everyone else is working on. Google offers a computer program where employees can look up names and see what others are working on – if you have an idea to contribute you then know exactly who to talk to.

3. Google is setting a very high level for candidates, applications, and employees, and follows their own recruitment methods.

4. Google offers 20% “free” time to their employees, thus liberating one working day per week for employees to do research projects which may benefit the company. Google Earth is a result of one of those projects.

5. Ideas come from everywhere. Sometimes Google turns to the public for new ideas. The Google mastheads, which are customized for holidays and events, are taken from a non-employee submission – one of them was designed by a 12-year-old girl.

6. With all the ideas floating around Google, the best way to determine which may work is to use supportive data – “data beats opinion”.

7. Creativity loves restraint. Again, Google has to have some way of streamlining all of the employee-generated ideas towards the company’s goals.

8. It is important to focus on creating things that are innovative and useful for people – just focusing on something you can “sell” to provide profit isn’t the right approach.

9. Google doesn’t waste ideas and projects – they try to change and transform them into something the company finds useful.

Eventually, Google may well be limiting its speed of growth, creativity and innovation by its own. The rapidly growing company may, at some point, reach a size where its creativity and innovation will be automatically restricted – creativity and innovation need chaos and freedom, but also a certain structure. The bigger Google gets, the more complicated this structure may become. Another threat to innovation is Google’s monopoly position on the market. After all, competition is one of the driving forces behind innovation.

Source: Article in BusinessWeek Magazine, information also available in The BQF Innovation Unit Blog.

Posted in Innovation, Society