Google's concept of "20 percent time" might not work at a lot of other businesses; employees would goof off. But at Google, there's more of a concern that employees are almost being too productive, and so the search giant is instituting new procedures to make sure brilliant ideas don't slip by execs.
Even a big corporation can only pursue so many research projects, after all, and given the economic climate, Google's been trying to redirect its resources away from less successful ones.
Still, the company can't be hasty when it comes to evaluating long-term potential, and in an interview, Eric Schmidt told Jessica E. Vascellaro, "We were concerned that some of the biggest ideas were getting squashed."
So now Google's conducting "innovation reviews," which Vascellaro characterized as "formal meetings where executives present product ideas bubbling up through their divisions to Mr. Schmidt, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and other top executives."
This way, especially good proposals might be less likely to get lost (and canceled) among the many pretty decent concepts.
It's an interesting development, especially considering how much of their time Schmidt, Page, and Brin must be dedicating to the reviews.
I agree, I don't think this is a particularly good idea. This in essences takes away the decentralized authority of the middle ranks and mnimizes their effectiveness to spearhead and lead newer projects.
Unless the Executive hierarchy is extremely tuned in (and most executives have a tendency to over-estimate their capabilities) this approach (which other top-heavy, innovation stalling companies already use) is pretty much as effective as flipping a coin.
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looks a poor solution to a
looks a poor solution to a difficult problem. This is the standard solution you find in many non-Google companies, but in google with much more projects/ideas to evaluate.
The risk is that sooner or later people will prefer to present projects that can be approved and not projects that "should" be approved - I thinking about crazy/disrruptive ideas that need a lot of sell-in and courage to present.
of course it does not depends on the Top Management, but on the middle management - they will be the first filter! - are they ambitious enough?
Idea - to make sure that for every 10 projects, at least 2 or 3 are breaktrought/Crazy/out-of-the-box.