Innovation - Create the primordial ooze. Chapter 6 of "How Google Works"

Google’s approach to innovation is different from that of Apple – focus is on being open and collaborating like the android ecosystem versus Apples closed IOS infrastructure. Even though there are competition and legal battles, Apple is not seen as the arch enemy and there are possibilities of cooperation.

Innovation is not giving people what they want – that is being responsive. An innovation has to offer both new functionality and surprise. An innovative product should not only be useful, it should be radically useful. It could also be many small incremental improvement steps that together makes a product like the search engine of Google radically better every year.

The Google [x] approach can be seen in diagram below

Google looks for the right context for innovation and prefers high growth areas with plenty of competitors – they are not looking for empty spaces.

Innovation is not something you can organise yourself into. You cannot tell people to be innovative – you can allow them to be innovative. It is not a process rather it is a lack of process. Google has a view of ideas that each compete for survival in a Darwinistic innovative environment.

Not only are people allowed to innovate – they are also encourage to be followers of innovative ideas as all successful ideas needs followership.

“Focus on the user and all else will follow” is also an important guidance in innovation. Many projects do not have a formal financial analysis as part of the decision process – if it benefits the user it will eventually turn into revenue. Some of the innovations Google has implemented has actually hurt revenue short term but the belief is that it benefits long term.

Google differentiate between users and customers and contrary to most companies they side with the user when there is a conflict between the two.

“You aren’t thinking big enough” or “think 10x” are classical Google statements trying to encourage engineers not to limit themselves when thinking and innovating. Google are trying to improve things 10x not 10%. This creates huge ambitious projects that attracts great people and is too important to fail. Interestingly that increases it success rate versus small projects that does not affect the corporation’s survival. Apple is a classic example – they could not afford to have the iPhone fail as they only had few very important product lines – any problems affect survival and that gets maximum attention.

Although Google funds and protects risky projects they also limit resources available as they believe this limitation actually increases creativity. In Marissa Meyer’s words: “Creativity loves constraints”.

Not stigmatising failure in Google is important – to innovate you need to fail well . Many quotes exemplify this philosophy:

“If you are thinking big enough, it is difficult to fail completely” Larry Page

“It helps to see failure as a road, not a wall” Scott Adams

"If everybody has to think outside the box, maybe it is the box that needs fixing" M. Gladwell

“Good judgement comes from experience, experience comes from bad judgement” Mulla Nasrudin

At the same time Google does not believe in sunk cost and are ready and willing to kill projects without killing the participants – also failed projects are a path to promotion.

“When achieving success requires multiple miracles in a row, it is probably time to call it a day." Regina Dugan & Kaigham Gabriel