Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google

What makes Google successful?
 
It’s the innovation driven from various resources existing within the company. Usually, large organisations have immense resources to facilitate innovation. However, the innovation realized in products and services exploits only a small fraction of these resources.
 

What are these resources?
These resources are nothing but a company’s assets. Some of them are highlighted below.
 

1) Human – Google has more than 20,000 employees spread across several functions such as engineering, operations, marketing, and sales. In addition to expertise in their field, all employees bring to the company their individual passions and interests, which play a key role in driving innovation.
2) Intellectual – The company possesses significant knowhow and intellectual property in many areas—most notably in crawling, storing, indexing, organizing, and searching data on a massive scale and with an extremely fast response time.
3) Physical – Google has a network of datacenters as well as a variety of custom, open source, and commercial hardware and software to harness this computing power and make it easily and seamlessly accessible to both customer facing products and internal tools.
4) Market – Hundreds of millions of people use Google’s products each day. These products generate revenue as well as goodwill that is useful to the company when it needs to try out, and get feedback on, its latest innovations.
5) Leveraged – Google fosters an ecosystem that allows other companies to prosper by providing additional value and content on top of its services. By lowering the impedance between itself and the outside community, Google facilitates a symbiotic relationship that enables and accelerates innovation for all.
6) Financial – The company has the ability to invest significant capital in many speculative projects and innovative ideas.

 

Google complements top-down innovation with its own entrepreneurial innovation model.
 
What is top-down innovation model at Google?

It is characterized by several traits mentioned below.

1) The creation of one or more entities focused on research or advanced development—for example, Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and Sun Microsystems Laboratories.
2) Recruitment of dedicated researchers, including many PhDs, to staff the research organization.
3) A small number of ambitious and often expensive long-term projects that are usually chosen, or at least vetted, by the organization’s top layers.
4) Formal and extensive research proposals, plans, and reviews.
5) A relatively closed and secretive environment, with limited sharing of resources and information with other parts of the company.

 
What is entrepreneurial innovation model at Google?
Google expects innovation from every employee. They say, “The business of Google is innovation”.
It is characterized by several traits mentioned below.

1) A flat, data-driven organizational structure.
• While the company has a traditional job ladder with familiar titles, it has always tried to keep the ratio of engineers and other individual contributors to managers as high as possible. It is not unusual for 30 to 40 people to report directly to a manager, or even to a director or VP. In addition, the key role of managers at Google is to guide and connect, not control.
2) A “20 percent time” policy.
• It allows engineers to invest roughly a day each week pursuing projects outside their official area of responsibility.
• The most important thing about 20 percent time is not how long employees are allowed to spend on side projects, but that Google encourages them to think and be entrepreneurial. There is no formal accounting of time spent—some people use more, others less.
3) Open and powerful development environments.
4) Services and tools to help launch, test, and get user feedback as early as possible.
5) Generous rewards and recognition for successful innovation.

 

Rewarding successful innovation
While for many Googlers the main incentive for innovation is seeing their idea become reality and reach millions of users, employees who take innovation from idea to successful product receive both monetary and honorary recognition. The Google Founders’ Award, launched in 2004 to reward outstanding entrepreneurial achievement, amounts up to millions of dollars.
 
Trying something new and not succeeding is an inescapable and important part of the innovation process. Google knows that if it never fails, then it is probably not being as innovative as it needs to be. When a project fails to meet expectations, the company acknowledges it, learns whatever lessons it can, and moves on to something different.
 
Source: Entrepreneurial Innovation at Google