Who Says Big Companies Can’t Innovate? What You Can Learn from Google Wave

by Vincent Chan on Jun 19, 2009

big-companies-innovation

We always have a perception that corporate giants cannot innovate because of bureaucracy and slow moving speed. Look at how General Motor destroyed themselves. They know that sustainable growth is not possible without innovation. Yet often time companies are fear to change. They just want to stay in the status quo and try to protect their existing profits by cutting costs and firing people.

So does that mean scale and innovation cannot coexist?

Many people will just give up when facing this dilemma, especially when their firms are still profitable. However, in today’s challenging economic environment, businesses need to innovate in order to move forward. Like Steve Jobs said:

“A lot of companies have chosen to downsize, and maybe that was the right thing for them. We chose a different path. Our belief was that if we kept putting great products in front of customers, they would continue to open their wallets.”

Google is another great company that will do everything to foster true innovation. No one can argue that this company is highly profitable when they are earning more than 4 billion dollar last year. But they believe that’s not enough. With 20,000 employees, Google thinks they can keep innovating by taking advantage of their scale.

Google’s co-founder, Sergey Brin, can go to extremes to insure the continuous innovation in his company. He said:

“Instead of having our employees in large buildings, we could have several thousand houses each with a garage – there’s nothing stopping us from doing that.”

Due to this belief, the Google teams have produced numerous excellent products from Gmail to Google Maps and the latest one – Google Wave.

google-wave

Two years ago, two engineers came to Brin and told him that:

“We want to do something new and revolutionary, but we’re not even going to tell you what it is. And we want to go back to Australia, hire a bunch of people and just work on it.”

The engineers thought Email was designed more than 20 years ago without any advanced technologies that we have today. Thus they believe they can do a better job and re-design this product.

I believe most companies in the world will reject this so-called proposal. Redesign Email? It’s just too crazy. But Brin thought otherwise as those engineers are the same ones behind Google Maps, a highly successful product. He thought it was a reasonable request.

Now they have created a product that aims to redefine email and online communication tools. Google Wave is an attempt to replace not one but all communication methods on the web – email, real-time chat, comments, media sharing, link sharing and wiki collaboration. We are still not sure if Wave is able to go mainstream. But this is definitely a high quality innovative product. It also proves that big companies are able to innovate when they have the right corporate culture.

How about your company’s culture? Have you motivated your workforce to innovate? If not, your company is standing still and eventually moving backward.