Google's nine points of innovation

I came across a good article about innovation tips of Google on businessweek May 17, 2007. Jim Lecinski, managing directore from Google broadcast this finding on second day of Digital Signage Expo 2007 in May. Google's nine points of innovation are as follow:

Idea comes from every where

Google expects everyone to innovate, even the finance team

Share everything you can
Every idea, every project, every deadline - it's all accessible to everyone on the intranet

You're brilliant, we're hiring
Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin approve hires. They favor intelligence over experience


A license to pursue dreams
Employees get a "free" day a week. Half of new launches come from this "20% time"

Innovation, not instant perfection
Google launches early and often in small beta tests, before releasing new features widely

Don't politic, use data
Mayer discourages the use of "I like" in meetings, pushing staffers to use metrics

Creativity loves restraint
Give people a vision, rules about how to get there, and deadlines

Don't kill projects - morph them
There's always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is a good source of inspiration in a team and everyone should come up with one idea i.e. stupid or usable during brainstorming sessions. Brainstorming is the best way to get good idea from all of team members

How can a team brainstorm?

- Encourage wild idea
- Write everything down
- Learn from experts
- Working through complex problem
- Be visual
- Take and use photos often
- Prototype everything
- Use post-it-note to vote

Company Culture and creativity

I think company culture can influence to creativity of people. We need to move traditional corporate communities to the community which is full of tolerant, diverse and open to new ideas. If our environment can’t support, we need to create that environment to be able to support creativity. To create good company culture

• Top management must welcome new ideas from everyone within the company

• The person who can give good ideas should be rewarded

• The negative criticism should not be allowed.

• Family spirit should be adopted within the company.

Innovation Tips from IDEO

1. Observe people, customers and non-customers

2. Play with physical workplace in a way that sends positively body language to employees and visitors

3. Think “verbs” not “nouns” in products and services offerings for creating wonderful experiences

4. Break rules and “fail forward” so that change is part of the culture and little setback is experienced

5. Stay human, scale your organizational environment so that there’s room for hot teams to emerge and thrive.

6. Build bridges from one department to another, form your company to your prospective customers and ultimately form the present to the future.

IDEO’s five-step methodology for innovation

IDEO is one of the world’s most innovative companies. It creates innovative products, services, spaces and experiences for such companies as Intel, P&G, Pepsi-Cola, Samsung, Metro, Prada, etc. and helps many other companies with their innovation.

IDEO’s process of innovation have improved the design of mouse for apple computer, soft-handled gripper toothbrush for Oral-B, “keep the change” account service for Bank of America, Game platform for Nokia, ergonomic monitor position design for Samsung, etc. Since 1991, IDEO has in the list of winners of annual Industrial Design Excellence Awards, and in 2005, Business Week showed IDEO is one of the twenty most innovative companies in the world. There are more than 400 employees from all disciplines of studies: engineers, designers, human factor experts and business strategists. They all create their workplace to make innovation by applying creativity, diversity, knowledge, and empathy.

Here is IDEO's methodology for innovation in my point of view after reading about IDEO and its innovation methods.

Understand the market, the client, the technology, and perceived constrains on the giving problems
(Understanding)


Observe real people in real-life situation(Observation)


Literally visualize new-to-the-world concepts and customers who will use them (Brainstorming)

Evaluates and refine the prototypes in a series of quick iterations (Prototyping)


Implement a new concept for commercialization. (Implementation)

Innovation is a key to success

Here is my view of how innovation become a key to success in a company. I did it with clip art gallary in MS word.