Innovation

I have been reading the "Google Story" over the past few days..
The account makes decent reading but disappoints the reader in more ways than one. This post is not a review of the book :)

While reading the book some interesting thoughts crossed my mind. Over the past few months, there has been a tremendous thrust on innovation at my work-place. Some of us were asked to spend 2 days at a workshop that was supposed to trigger a stream of ideas from our side. The "Google Story" makes me think that the work-shop based approach might not be really effective.

Google folks started with the bottom up approach. They were never chasing the next big idea. They identified a problem that they were faced with (effective search on the web). They then worked with passion to solve this problem. They built their search engine block by block. They broke the problem into small pieces and set about solving them.

The innovation approach(es) that organizations use these days have too much focus on generating the next big idea. The employees also invest their energies on coming up with something radical or pathbreaking. In the end the focus shifts completely away from the basic issues the industry or the customer is faced with. The more one thinks about it, successful organizations have always invested on solving the basic problems that they have identified. To its credit however the workshop based approach makes people think beyond the obvious!