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oogle: July 25th 2011, three videos were given for academic study as one of the course requirement of Philosophy of Management. The three videos

Google Innovation by Speaker Dan Russell, Research Scientist and Search Anthropologist, Nine notions of innovation Innovation at Google : Doughlas Merill

focuses on one simple notion INNOVATION So, what do we actually mean by the word innovation: I googled the word and wikipedia gave me the result as The term innovation derives from the Latin word innovatus, which is the noun form of innovare "to renew or change," stemming from in-"into" + novus-"new". Although the term is broadly used, innovation generally refers to the creation of better or more effective products, processes, technologies, or ideas that affect markets, governments, and society. Innovation differs from invention or renovation in that innovation generally signifies a substantial change compared to entirely new or incremental changes So, renew or change for What? Why? In society, innovation aids in comfort, convenience, and efficiency in everyday life In business and economics, innovation is the catalyst to growth In the organizational context, innovation may be linked to positive changes in efficiency, productivity, quality, competitiveness, market share, and others

And what is google? Google Inc. is an American multinational public corporation invested in Internet search, cloud computing, and advertising technologies. Google hosts and develops a number of Internet-based services and products and generates profit primarily from advertising through its AdWords program. The company was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, often dubbed the "Google Guys", while the two were attending Stanford University as PhD candidates. It was first incorporated as a privately held company on September 4, 1998, and its initial public offering followed on August 19, 2004. At that time Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt agreed to work together at Google for twenty years, until the year 2024. The company's mission statement from the outset was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", and the company's unofficial slogan coined by Google engineer Amit Patel and supported by Paul Buchheit is "Don't be evil". In 2006, the company moved to its current headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Before I arrive at application of above videos of innovation in my environmental research area of interest, let me take you on a briefing tour of all the three videos:

GOOGLE INNOVATION: DAN RUSSELL,

RE SE A R C H S CIE NTIS T AND SE A RC H A NT HR OP OL OGI S T

According to Dan Russell, Google clearly relies on innovation to keep our business alive and growing. Translating that desire into a continual innovation practice is central to the outlook and world-view that Google has as a corporate culture. Innovation isn't just for the futurists, but a part of what everyone in the company is expected to do on a day-today basis. People who work on internal processes, for example, are expected to be as innovative as engineers and product managers who drive externally visible products. Innovation isn't something that the company can just leave to a few bright minds, but is deeply embedded in the culture of the company. Beyond culture, though, there are a few

pragmatic behaviors that help Google be innovative.

A commonplace belief is that innovation originates with an identified market or user need. Innovative ideas originate in many placessometimes with user needs, but also occasionally from technology opportunities that suddenly become available. In these cases, the user need might not be clearly identified at the outset of research, but become evident only over time. Ultimately, of course, an innovation has to be user-relevant, but not everything starts that way.

One of the key drivers of Google innovation is focus on data-driven analytics of our products. It instrument just about everything one can think of, log the data (anonymizing along the way to preserve privacy), then analyze it extensively. It recognize that innovation often proceeds in an evolutionary fashion, and that apparently large leaps in design and novel concepts are often hidden beneath a great deal of under-the-covers work the precedes the public announcement. Intuitions are often incorrect and to ensure maximum efficiency it goes for extensive testing and sub testing of the user interface design. Large changes in the design may very well lead to poor performance shifts, while tiny, sometimes imperceptible changes can have profound consequences. Innovation is thus often smoothly evolutionary, albeit looking like punctuated evolution from the outside, but driven by continual rapid iteration and redesign, always driven by an objective function that includes goodness-of-fit to the environment and expatiation of opportunities as they arise.

Finally, it can be said that innovative products really are the product of many minds. A very small team might drive the initial design and creation of the concept, but having multiple people look at, evaluate, comment-upon and lend supporting insights is valuable. The trick is to allow these additional insights to be supportive, and not weigh the original ideas down with extraneous freight. Keeping an innovation clear, clean and useful to the consumer is an important practice to avoid losing the key insight and value in the innovation.

9 NOTIONS OF INNOVATION

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

Ideas come from everywhere. (Google expects you to innovate.) Share everything you can. (Every idea accessible to everyone.) Youre brilliant. Were hiring. (Google favours intelligence over experience.) License to pursue dreams. (Employees get a free day a week to pursue self-set projects.) Innovation, not instant perfection. (Google launches early and often with small beta tests.) Dont politic, use data. (Use of I like discouraged.) Creativity loves restraint. (Give people a vision.) Worry about usage and users, not money. (Provide something simple to use, easy to love. Money will come.) Dont kill projects, morph them. (Theres always a kernel of something good that can be salvaged.)

INNOVATION AT GOOGLE: DOUGHLAS MERILL

Doughlas Merill says Google is technically a SEARCH + APPLICATION + ADVERTISEMENT company or a SEARCH ENGINE FOR INNOVATION There are three types of innovation: FUNDAMENTAL, INCREMENTAL, SIDE EFFECTS. Google has actually benefitted out of all the three to be the no. one search engine. How? Lets see

The story began with two Stanford doctoral students, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who developed a set of algorithms that in 1998 sparked a leap in Web-search performance. Basically, they turned search into a popularity contest. In

addition to gauging a phrase's appearance on a Web page, as other engines did, it assessed relevance by counting the number and importance of other pages that linked to that page.

Google appear driven more by the quest for impossible perfection, to build something that searches every bit of information on the Web and to deliver exactly what the user is looking for, every time. They know that this won't ever happen, and yet they keep at it. They also pursue a seemingly gratuitous quest for speed: Four years ago, the average search took approximately 3 seconds. Now it's down to about 0.2 seconds. And since 0.2 is more than zero, it's not quite fast enough.

Google Innovation understands that its two most important assets are the attention and trust of its users. If it takes too long to deliver results or an additional word of text on the home page is too distracting, Google risks losing people's attention. If the search results are lousy, or if they are compromised by advertising, it risks losing people's trust. Attention and trust are sacrosanct.

Google Innovation also understands the capacity of the Web to leverage expertise. Its product engineering effort is more like an ongoing, all-hands discussion. The site features about 10 technologies in development, many of which may never be products per se. They are there because Google wants to see how people react. It wants feedback and ideas. Having people in on the game who know a lot of stuff tells you earlier whether good ideas are good ideas that will actually work.

APPLICATION IN THE AREA OF ENVIRONMENTAL RESEARCH

Most of the problems arising today have one or the other underlying cause as the environmental change or the shifts in the climatic trends making it difficult to cope up with. As a native of developing country and the academic choice of Environmental researcher, there are various issues that I would encounter in Environmental or environmental based social research to find solutions for the benefit to the society as a whole or a contribution to the knowledge domain. Most of the climate change issues are dealt today by adaptation and mitigation strategies. Because the issue of climate change is new to us in the field of research as well as policy formulation, one cannot look back upon the past experiences or the historical past to find the solution. Need of the innovative practices arises in that case to facilitate easy decision making. As most of the policy decisions need the major involvement of the primary stakeholder i.e. the community KEEPING PEOPLE FIRST the Google innovation practices find a similar niche in the policy formulation. This hold true even in the data collection stage of the research because to address the needs of all respondents, a researcher has to be diverse in thoughts as well as applicability. All the nine notions can be effectively applied to come out with a good research. Let us see how? y Need of a good vision and mission for the research project People centric, equitably beneficial for all, flexible, holistic. It is only possible when one follows notion 1 & 7 y The sources of data for the quantitative and qualitative research in case of environmental research are not confined usually to one subject and are mostly base on contingent analysis which is again subjected to lots of error and biases. To arrive at a accurate result one needs to follow notion 1&6 y Notion 3 & 5 are necessary to inculcate a motivational factor, a continuous enthusiasm in the researcher throughout the work progress of the research y Notion 8&9 of course motivates to reconcile the short term benefits for the long term beneficial future for the individual as well as the organizational success.

Submitted by Jyotsna Singh as an assignment for Philosophy of Management