The Harvard Business Review article, “Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine” (April 2008), describes how Google is built for innovation. I highly recommend reading the article, and will focus on just a couple ideas here:
- Budgeting for innovation
- Superior infrastructure built for growth
Budgeting for innovation
Test if your organization values innovative activity: do they pay you for it? Google’s engineers are required to spend 20% of their time on a side project of their choosing. This means they take 20% of their time from search & advertising–Google’s bread & butter–and dedicate to risky, innovative activity.
Google’s organizational structure is effective at managing innovation. They understand that in the long-term, it’s more risky to focus solely on search & advertising. Investment in innovative activity is a hedge against potential downturns in their core business and a likely generator of future growth.
Superior infrastructure built for growth
Growing applications, from development to production, is challenging. Growing applications easily and on-demand is down-right hard. Your web application environment needs to be easy to set up, easy to share with other devs, fault-tolerant, easy to launch for users to see, and easy to scale up to meet production demands. Try building these capabilities into your infrastructure, then allowing your devs to do it without needing a sysadmin.
There are new tools that let us approach this level of superior infrastructure. They may not be as fast, or as easy, or as scalable. Tools like virtualization, re-usable web services and code libraries, and a solid architecture can bring us closer to this goal.
no comment untill now