Lisbon Council . It’s not an easy question, but it is one that Europe as a whole needs to address, as innovation is vital for competitiveness.Mail Goggles . This allows you to check check that you're really sure you want to send an email you might later regret.paper a while ago on costs compared to guaranteed reliable hardware, and claimed that our approach generated a 10x price per price increase on cost per Mb vs traditional approaches, a game changing number.Wikinomics and the Era of Openness. Much of the subsequent discussion of his emphasis on collabaratory innovation focused upon the consequences for intellectual property regulation.keynote speech . She outlined an agenda that rightly embraced a broad definition of innovation. In addition to innovation by lab workers in 'white coats', she recognised that real innovation is possible outside of the R&D laboratory in all sort of industries.Put the consumer first : We have a core product philosophy within Google that goes like this: “Follow the user and all else will follow”. It turns out not to be a new idea, as Henry Ford learnt when he famously said: “If I asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have asked me to build a faster horse”. The key is understanding user behavior and building and iterating products by ‘following the data’ on aggregated usage. (The Economist recently provided a excellent introduction to the power of data .)Remove barriers to innovation : Speed matters. Consider Playfish , the company behind the super popular Facebook App Animal farm. They started 2 years ago in UK, and built their entire service on Amazon’s ‘infrastructure as a service’ platform (that enables business to rent data centre capacity rather than build it themselves). They recently sold to Electronic Arts for $275m. We sometimes talk of a new ‘innovation without permission’ culture, and facilitating that would be a good goal to set for legislators.Diversity in the hiring process matters , as without multiple perspectives innovation will die because everyone sees the problem the same way. Europe’s universities must educate a broad cross-section of students in maths, science and computer science. In particular more women need to be encouraged to take careers in technology.Risk taking is as important for large companies as for start-ups : We encourage employees to take risks, and we tailor our compensation model to encourage risk taking. Otherwise people quickly learn that to get ahead they shouldn’t try anything new, especially if there is a risk of failure. The result: innovation dies.
The Ford analogy seems a little off. Because Ford promotes that consumers would want a horse instead of a car I took what Ford said to mean consumers don't know what to want. But when I read Google's approach I don't hear anything analogous with the Ford quote when you say: “Follow the user and all else will follow”.
ReplyDelete@ymerej: Thank you for the comment. The analogy is indeed intended to infer that asking consumers what they want (the traditional focus group model) will likely result in more of the same. What we mean by "follow the user and all else will follow" is that when we look at the aggregated, anonymised user data, we can often infer use behaviour patterns, which in turn help us build or refine features and products that are tailored to the end user.
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