Everyone’s favorite Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, talks about how innovation happens at Google. Well, how it happened three years ago anyway. Her 9 keystones are still relevant today:
- Ideas come from everywhere
- Share everything you can
- Hire brilliant people
- License to pursue dreams – Google gives employees 20% of their time to work on individual pet projects (50% of the projects launched in the second half 2005 were “20% time” projects)
It turns out when you take really smart people, give them really good tools they make really beautiful, amazing things that are really exciting and they do it with a lot of passion and momentum.
- Innovation, not instant perfection –
the key is iteration.
- Data is apolitical – decisions get made based on data, not on rank of the decision makers within the company
- Creativity loves constraint
- Users, not money
- Don’t kill projects, morph them
The question and answer session after her lecture is also quite enlightening.