Fostering innovation
Sam blogged his notes from a talk by the Chairman and CEO of TSMC. One point struck me that I've heard several times this semester: if you want to create an organization that fosters innovation, you can't punish ideas that fail. That's what makes Google's 20% project such a good idea for their environment. They need to constantly innovate so they let each worker use 20% of their to work on anything they want. I'm not sure how this works in practice, but many of the successful Google apps (gmail, etc.) came from someone's 20% project.
I think you have to treat innovation like a big brainstorming session. Someone once told me they wish they could immediately shut down the bad ideas that come up during brainstorming sessions. Why waste time on a bad idea? The problem is if you do that people won't want to share different and potentially "crazy" ideas next time. Same thing with innovation, if you punish the failures every time, no one will want to push the envelope next time. It is not an efficient process, but much like in the venture capital world, a few big successes can trump dozens of failures.
5 Comments:
Excellent post.
Yeah, the 20% project is cool. More organizations should do it. But one thing that pissed me off about it at Google is that only developers can do it: program / product managers don't have a 20% project. Even the more senior technical staff, like engineering directors, don't really do it.
The second half of your post is excellent!
As an aside, I think it's wrong to say many of the successful Google apps came from the 20% project. Most people can name GMail, and a couple of people can name specific little features like the movietime search hack, but try naming another well-known product that came from a 20% project. The Google people I asked didn't know any. If you take it further, even GMail is only successful as a loss-leader so far, it's not a profitable product, but that's getting off-track.
I can't comment on which 20% projects have been financially successful, but the recent Secure Access program was one along with Google News and Orkut to name a couple others.
That sucks that only developers get to do it. That doesn't seem right.
Personally, I think that there has to be a balance in innovation activities and the financial ramification. Playing the devil advocate, you certainly don't want a 20% project that is a huge overhead with no financial return. Balancing innovation with operations/finance is an art.
That's the point of limiting it to 20% ;)
GSA (Google Secure Access) is an interesting idea. Time will tell if it's successful: Web Accelerator was similar and failed, and some think the same of GSA: http://google.blognewschannel.com/index.php/archives/2005/09/19/google-pulls-the-other-leg-with-secure-access/. People who seriously care about this already use onion routing and other anonymizers like TOR (http://tor.eff.org/). But if this presents a new, no-setup type approach, it could work well. (Of course, it would still have to be profitable, we'll see how they swing that ;))
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