Social Machinery

One of the biggest challenges technology companies face these days is to maintain a fast pace of innovation and try to foster an entrepreneurial culture where employees can bring lead and drive the development of new ideas.

Google is a great example of innovative culture and one of the programs that I really like is their Innovation 80/20 model, so called “innovation time off”, where employees are encourages spending up to 20% of their time working in their own innovation projects or ideas.

The kind of ideas is wide ranging. It could be a project that could help Google to increase their bottom line –as in the case of Adsense or Orkut. Or it could be related to improve existing processes, ways of working or even making the working place better.

Even do this program is a structured process, one of the main drivers behind this model is to foster more passion and commitment from employees as they are driving their own ideas to realization. Some of the great innovation examples from this model are Gmail, Google Wave and Google Earth.

One the key element about Google’s Innovation time out is that is more about creating innovation culture rather than a rigid program. Actually employees who want to driver their own projects need to sell it internally to different departments and stakeholders; they become evangelist inside their organization spreading disruptive ideas that could improve or create new services.

Another interesting aspect is that using 20% of your time working on your own ideas, doesn’t mean that you will work in your daily tasks only four days a week. Google culture is highly driven by a strong competitive attitude, pride and hard working.  Therefore, everyone expect that you will continue performing your other responsabilities. Nevertheless, this 20% gives you a personal way to structure your time and give priority to things that could be important for the company.

Giving space for employees to innovative is not something new’ 3M in the 50’s pioneered this concept as a fundamental cornerstone of their innovate culture. Employees where allow to spend up to 15% of their time researching on new concepts. As example,  two exceptional products where developed by self-motivated employees ost-it notes and masking tape.

Making innovation work

Google innovation time out is a non-hierarchical model. All employees are allowed to bring their innovation ideas to be voted, debated and reviewed by peers. Forget about senior executives evaluating ideas in long steering committees sessions, the Innovation time out innovation model aims for having a better way to innovate following the mantra fail fast, fail early, fail cheap. The lack of dependence of hierarchy empowers individual and remove any political or burocratic barrier for driving innovation inside the company. Probably this is the most difficult part to understand for most conventional companies; is not about giving time to people but giving the right environment to embrace innovation.

Key elements of Google’s innovation time out model are:

1. Develop a formal process for project selection, monitoring, and evaluation. 
2. Fail often, Fail fast and learn. Even if 95% of the ideas failed, if you can still get two great concepts from this program is worth it. Besides you cannot innovate unless you try.
3. Fail cheap -think big but start small.  Starting with pilots or small trials is the best way to try out your ideas and not burn excessive amount of resources.
4. Drive entrepreneurial spirit.  Google allows their employees to drive their ideas all the way to CEO. They are the ones running the show and not their managers