

What the Death of Google Labs Means for Innovation at Google - nbj914
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/07/what-the-death-of-google-labs-means-for-innovation-at-google/242265/

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russell
Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC
or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly
inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely
pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established
companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the
bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to
bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at
PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus
doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially
baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes
sacrificed to the immediate.

If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own
pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need
time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google
failed.

Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a
successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where
the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market
researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal
entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope
that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.

