Maybe Innovation’s Not for Everyone

Pretty much all companies talk about the importance of innovation, to be creative, to come up with new ideas. Google has its famous 20% Rule: employees can spend 20% of their time on activities/projects that interest them without considering whether/how what they do could benefit the company. The idea is that if people do what they like, then some of those ideas may hit gold. Possibly. Some times. I heard that Facebook takes it even further and allows pretty much everyone to do whatever they like all the time!

That seems outrageous at first. But if you stop and think, what exactly do companies like Google and Facebook really need their employees for? I mean, their algorithms are already written, servers deployed with redundancies and backups built in already. They are not manufacturing companies; so they don’t that need to build one more fridge or car (or anything else) to sell more. Since they provide everything for free, they don’t have service contracts to provide free upgrades or patch releases. So what exactly do they need employees for? To be creative, to come up with that next big idea.

Most other companies, on the other hand, are not in the same boat. They have to manufacture or they have contractual obligations or they operate in regulated industries. To put it differently, their business model is totally different. Maybe they should realize that and stop trying to try to be like Google or Facebook.


One company that gets this point is Apple. You never hear Apple saying that it wants every employee to come up with the next big idea. That job is left to Steve Jobs alone! Then again, maybe it takes the supreme self-confidence of a Jobs to know that his company can make money in a different way, not by copying what others do…

Comments

  1. Guruprasad RaoMarch 11, 2011 at 5:04 PM

    So says the IP SPOC ... Very funny.

    ReplyDelete

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