For a company that began as a better search engine -- a modest innovation, if useful -- Google has come amazingly far, with augmented reality Glass, self-driving cars, a space elevator, and arguably the most advanced image processing and intelligent software in the world. How did Google become a revolutionary innovator?
What Is Revolutionary Innovation?
A revolutionary innovation, as I explained in a previous blog, goes beyond mere disruption of fat and lazy incumbent businesses. Revolutionary innovation creates new ways of imagining the world. Another way to think of it is that revolutionary innovators turn science fiction into reality.
An artist may have the creativity to imagine self-driving cars. An inventor may file a patent on part of the engineering approach. But it takes a larger organization to pull off the innovation required to turn stories and patents into products that people can actually buy and use. Innovation requires more than original ideas and lone inventors.
That's why I believe Microsoft deserves more credit for innovation, occasionally creating something amazing and original like the Kinect. It takes brilliant engineers and scientists working together to pull off a feat that impressive.
Innovation, Google Style
And then there's Google.
What to make of a company that is developing some of the most advanced artificial intelligence and virtual reality in the world? That has priced and will soon sell augmented reality glasses, called Project Glass? That is engineering real products that go beyond what many science fiction authors have dared to imagine?
For now, the bulk of Google's revenue comes from sustaining its core online advertising businesses -- really, a broad range of products and services, rather than a single revenue stream.
Then there's YouTube, Gmail, Android, Maps, Apps, and a wide range of smaller projects like Google TV, Wallet, a new cloud service, Scholar, Books, Photos, Translate, Blogger, Sites and more.
Take any one of these products alone, and it could propel a hot startup company onto the home page of TechCrunch, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and a hundred other tech news sites as well as mainstream media sources like the NY Times and CNN. In fact, many of Google's cool products began as hip independent companies, before Google snapped them up.
Some of these Google products have stumbled, or failed to dominate their markets in competition with Apple or Amazon or Microsoft. It's easy to criticize a giant for not winning every battle, and to speculate about what could have been done better.
But what's amazing about the greatest Google innovations, the truly revolutionary innovations, is that they're hatching within the company's own offices, not incubating in a venture funded startup down the street.
They aren't even coming from startups funded by Google Ventures, Google's own investment wing. Rather, Google is hiring some of the brightest engineers and computer scientists in the world, and creating products that seem very likely to change the world over the coming years and decades.
Building Innovation at Google X
Building Innovation at Google X
To achieve revolutionary breakthroughs, Google created the secretive Google X Lab, physically separate from the main corporate campus. Following the pattern of some previous R&D powerhouses, like Xerox PARC and HP, Google decided to create a small and interdisciplinary team of top scientists, and give them more free rein than possible when the focus is quarterly earnings.
Some of the fundamentals are: independence, interdisciplinarity, the right size, separation from immediate commercial interests, funding, and a mandate to dream.
Hire any management consulting firm, and they can tell you the best practices for building an innovation center. There's a McKinsey article from 2001 that will tell you what you need to know to get started. Companies have been building successful innovation centers for the past hundred years and more, ever since the industrial revolution.
What's amazing is that Google is doing it today, and with such encouraging early results.
Some of the fundamentals are: independence, interdisciplinarity, the right size, separation from immediate commercial interests, funding, and a mandate to dream.
Hire any management consulting firm, and they can tell you the best practices for building an innovation center. There's a McKinsey article from 2001 that will tell you what you need to know to get started. Companies have been building successful innovation centers for the past hundred years and more, ever since the industrial revolution.
What's amazing is that Google is doing it today, and with such encouraging early results.
Conclusion
Let Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, Jive and the other technology IPOs of 2012 have their deserved success. Let Apple sell a perfect TV set, and update its phones and tablets. Let Amazon perfect warehouse management and supply chains and global retailing. Let all of the other technology companies have their due.
For truly revolutionary innovation, it's still hard to imagine any company today that can rival Google.
Related posts:
No comments:
Post a Comment