jbonaguro – Managing in Information-Intensive Companies

Does Maturation Threaten Exploration at Google?

In another effort to nurture their Innovation Value Chain, Google is considering an incubator model-over and beyond their famous 20% time. This could move Google away from a hybrid model to a stand-alone operation to nurture innovation.

By Schmidt’s own words, Google sounds like it’s having a conversion problem:

“There was a time when three people at Google could build a world-class product and deliver it, and it is gone. So I think it’s absolutely harder to get things out the door. That’s probably our biggest strategic issue.”

But the article points to discontent at Google that suggests a stand-alone operation is not the solution. Engineers are frustrated by working on exploitative problems, which may drive away top engineers who want to innovate. If retaining those top engineers means they end up in the stand-alone unit, will it make the conversion problem that much greater?

Full article:

Challenge.gov rewards external innovation, but what about inside?

Challenge.gov is an attempt to address the gap in idea generation faced by the federal government. Vivek Kundra’s (our first federal CIO) found success using prizes to recruit citizen programmers in Washington DC. Volunteer programmers would use the city’s data catalog to develop new services (i.e. DC Bikes, Historic tours, stumble home, etc).

The twist on the prize for innovation approach is that the ideas are not developed in-house. Many of the prize projects seem to focus on external development and deployment–not changing internal processes. Innovations take the form of novel use of government data or pilot deployment techniques.

For example, this challenge asks for “the development of web-based tools or applications to integrate cancer-relevant data from one or more of the following data resources with data available through the Community Health Data Initiative”:

http://challenge.gov/HHS/73-enabling-community-use-of-data-for-cancer-prevention-and-control

While this challenge looks to incubate novel classroom approaches:

http://challenge.gov/ED/60-challenge-to-innovate-c2i

Neither of these approaches seem to address the need for internal innovation. I think this approach is fantastic in terms of extending government resources at low costs, but it doesn’t appear to expose internal problems to new ideas.

Joy