DAVENPORT T.H. – IYER B., Reverse Engineering Google’s Innovation Machine. Harvard Business Review, April, 2008

Abstract

In the pantheon of internet-based companies, Google stands out as both particularly successful and particularly innovative. Not since Microsoft has a company had so much success so quickly. Google excels at IT and business architecture, experimentation, improvisation, analytical decision making, participative product development, and other relatively unusual forms of innovation. It balances an admittedly chaotic ideation process with a set of rigorous, data-driven methods for evaluating ideas. The company culture attracts the brightest technical talent, and despite its rapid employee growth Google still gets 100 applicants for every open position. It has developed or acquired a wide variety of new offerings to augment the core search product. Its growth, profitability, and shareholder equity are at unparalleled levels. This highly desirable situation may not last forever, but Google has clearly done something right.

Indeed, Google has been the creator or a leading exponent of new approaches to business and management innovation. Much of what the company does is rooted in its legendary IT infrastructure, but technology and strategy at Google are inseparable and mutually permeable—making it hard to say whether technology is the DNA of its strategy or the other way around. Whichever it is, Google seems to embody the decades-old, rarely fulfilled vision of IT pundits that technology should do more than just support the business; it should engender strategic opportunity and be architected with that purpose in mind. As such, Google may well be the internet-era heir to such companies as General Electric and IBM as an exemplar of management practice.

We haven’t spent a lot of time in the Googleplex, and between us we’ve consumed only one of the company’s tasty and free cafeteria meals. One of us impulsively tried to question Sergey Brin in the Googleplex courtyard, but he beat a hasty retreat and came close to calling security. Fortunately, however, the company is quite open (there are scores of official and unofficial blogs accessible through the company’s website, for example), and non-insiders can find countless clues as to how the company approaches innovation. Many of those clues we unearthed, appropriately enough, through Google searches. Based on our years of observing how Google does what it does so well, we have identified a number of key innovation practices that others can profitably adopt. To be sure, some of Google’s attributes—two are its category-killing search engine and a massive, scalable IT infrastructure—would be very hard and very costly to emulate. But others—technology explicitly architected for innovation coupled with a well-considered organizational and cultural strategy—can be applied diligently and successfully by businesses across many industries. Leggi l’articolo completo