Students in the MA program in Law, Technology and Business Innovation met for an open discussion with the CEO of Google Israel, Mr. Barak Regev. The meeting took place in the framework of the course on Internal Organizational Innovation taught by Prof. Dafna Schwartz of the Adelson School of Entrepreneurship and head of the Research Authority at Reichman University. Regev shared Google’s secrets on the development of innovation in society with the students.
Regev said that out of the nine Google products that are digital assets, and from which most of the company's revenue comes, two were unplanned: Google Photos and email (Gmail).
But Regev began his lecture by discussing a failed Google product – the Google+ social network. According to him, “Google+ was a huge failure that took many resources from the company and prevented the promotion of other ideas.” In his words, “The greatness of a company is partly to be able to get to a point where you can say, ‘I failed.’ The bigger greatness, and this is really what Google is for me, is the ability to iterate – that is, to take something from the failure and do something even better with it. And that is how Google Photos was born. It was not a strategic plan, but a contingency plan, a feature removed from Google+.”
Pictured, from right: Prof. Lior Zemer, dean of the school, Barak Regev, CEO of Google Israel, and Prof. Dafna Schwartz, School of Entrepreneurship and head of the Research Authority
“How do you foster innovation in an organization, regardless of its size?” Barak asked. “A rule of thumb is ‘A vision that touches the heart but is also terribly scary. I want to make you feel uncomfortably excited.’ That is, the company should choose to engage in projects that make their employees excited and afraid at the same time, but with a smile on their faces. There is no fear of failure. Failure is welcome. But a project that failed and from which we learned nothing is a wasted failure.”
According to Regev, it is important for the organization to have a mechanism to examine projects and goals and to stop them when they are not successful, as was the case with Google+, and it is of course also important to look at what was learned from the process in order to generate a new spark.
Another principle, that concerns the way a company employee is encouraged to feel and share, is “the principle of freedom. Not micro-management, but macro-management. Freedom that is managed with boundaries. Thanks to this environment, that exists at Google, the company's engineers noticed the positive features of the Google+ product and, with the help of parameters that the managers were not privy to, they felt comfortable presenting the advantages of Google Photos to their managers. That is to say, the new product came from the employees and not from the management.
“Google does not have a monopoly on all innovative ideas, so it has created something unique: ‘The 20%.’ Any employee at any level can decide that for one day a week they can work on something else, something that burns inside of them. Something that would be huge for Google. It was based on this principle that our email was born – Gmail.”
Beyond the ability to accept failures and learn from them, and beyond creating a work environment that allows freedom, Google tries to solve global problems with the help of vision. The problems that most concern Google are climate change and how to enable users in Africa to enjoy the Internet. Google's vision is one that “inspires the mind and encourages the heart.” According to Regev, a huge amount of time is invested in this vision. He said that sometimes it will take weeks to choose the right terminology, the right word, that will spark the imagination and motivate action.
Finally, Regev discussed Google's decision to establish its first innovation lab outside of the US in Israel – Google X. “Anyone can improve by 10 percent, but if you need to improve by 100 percent, it requires rethinking every question. The idea of the innovation lab is to ask the craziest questions and offer a platform for trial and error. This is how, for example, the idea for the autonomous vehicle was born.”
