Google and the Seven Rules of Innovation

Google and the Seven Rules of Innovation

Google is a company known for being innovative. Whether it’s the products that they release or the organizational culture that they’ve created, Google has shown an ability to think outside the box. The company has grown from a small startup started as a school project at Standford to one of the largest and most profitable companies in the world. A spirit of innovation is one of the foundational elements on which the company is built and an emphasis is placed on trying to ensure that this element remains.

Seven Rules of Innovation

Davila, Epstein and Shelton (2013) have devised seven rules of innovation. The rules that the authors created are:

1) Exerting strong leadership on the innovation decisions.

2) Integrating innovation into the basic business mentality.

3) Aligning the amount and type of innovation to the company’s business.

4) Managing the natural tension between creativity and value capture.

5) Neutralizing organizational antibodies.

6) Recognizing that the basic unit of innovation includes a network of people both inside and outside the company.

7) Creating the right metrics and rewards for innovation.

We’ll look at how Google appears to be meeting these metrics.

Rule 1: Exerting Strong Leadership on the Innovation Decisions

Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have made it a priority to stress how important original thinking is to the company. According to former CEO Eric Schmidt (Hardy & Quentin, 2011), "the leadership, in particular the founders spent a lot of time on stressing this, on having original ideas -- if you had an idea that was copycat you were derided” (p. 3). By putting an emphasis on innovation from the top, Brin and Page have made it clear that innov...

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...for products that they’ve created.

Conclusion

Innovation is one of Google’s core values. By following Davila, Epstein and Shelton’s (2013) seven rules of innovation, they have a systematic, all encompassing approach to innovation. Because they’ve been able to retain this culture of innovation while growing quite large, it is likely that Google will continue to be at the forefront of technology innovation.

Works Cited

Davila, T., Epstein, M., & Shelton, R. (2013). Making innovation work: How to manage it, measure it, and profit from it. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education, Inc.

Hardy, Q. (2011). Google’s Innovation-And Everyone’s?. Forbes.com. 3.

Searching for winners: Google. (2013). CIO (13284045), 2.

Spector, A., Norvig, P., & Petrov, S. (2012). Google’s hybrid approach to research. Communications of the ACM, 55, 34-37. doi:10.1145/2209249.2209262