Manufacturology

Google’s 20 percent innovation time policy

From time to time I’ve read about com­pa­nies that pro­vide their employ­ees with some frac­tion of their paid work­ing time to do what they want. That is, to work on and elab­o­rate any of their own ideas that they like as long as they fall rea­son­ably within the company’s field of business.

The most famous exam­ple is per­haps Google, where employ­ees are said to be granted 20 per­cent ‘inno­va­tion time’.

In a post on Har­vard Busi­ness Review’s blog sec­tion, Chris Trim­ble expressed scep­ti­cism regard­ing whether the ‘Google myth’ is really true. It is, he argues, unlikely that such a strat­egy would pay off for a com­pany with ‘nor­mal’ resources. (Google appar­ently has nearly unlim­ited resources.)

In a com­ment to the HBR post, I men­tioned an arti­cle in Ny Teknik last year (Google trans­la­tion here) where for­mer Eric­s­son CEO Sven-Christer Nils­son revealed how Eric­s­son got on the IP-telephony train. It hap­pened, accord­ing to Nils­son, due to a strong tra­di­tion of ‘skunk works’ among the company’s engi­neers. By the time firm man­age­ment realised that they had missed the IP-train, it turned out that there was already active IP devel­op­ment at 15–16 places within the company.

I also know that I’ve been told how some of ABB’s prod­ucts ori­gin from the time when engi­neers at ASEA devel­oped for fun in their spare time.

My opin­ion is that curios­ity and play­ful­ness are excep­tional moti­va­tors. If you give the right peo­ple the right resources, they might actu­ally achieve great things. It may not be what man­age­ment expected, because the kind of peo­ple that I’m talk­ing about have strong gut feel­ings about what they want to do. But since strat­egy is about catch­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties, isn’t it a good idea that man­age­ment nur­ture cre­ativ­ity and lis­ten with one ear to what appears from below the surface?

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