Google Innovation How Google's Innovative Technologies Have Changed the World

The Google founders deliberately designed and continually fuel a corporate culture that puts innovation at the center, acting as a highly effective catalyst for creating new products and services. One of the foundational elements of their culture is the Rule of 20%, which gives engineers the flexibility of spending up to 20% of their time on projects they are interested in transforming from concept to finished product (Laffey, 2007). Since instituting this program at the launch of the company, products and services generated from its successful use has delivered 56% of total revenues to Google on an annual basis (MIT Sloan Review, 2006). Google Docs, Gmail, personal search, Google+, Android operating systems, Goggles (visual search) and Latitude are all the result of the Rule of 20% Program (Manyika, 2009). Taken together, Google's technologies have made a major impact on the world, and their pace of innovation is changing the nature of the new product and services development process itself as well (Deegan, 2008).

Google Innovations That Are Transforming The World

The concept of having semantic search that can quickly and thoroughly index the Web was originated by Google founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin when both were graduate students at Stanford University. They were working on their dissertations and wanted to sort academic references by those that had been most and least referenced. There was no approach to accomplish this in any of the academic search engines and online databases. Larry Page and Sergei Brin devised an algorithm that would take into account these variations, and the beginnings of the PageRank algorithm was formed (Laffey, 2007). Over time, the founders Larry Page and Sergei Brin refined the PageRank algorithm with the core...

LSI has served as the Launchpad of dozens of new product and service ideas, incouding the highly profitable AdWords and AdSense programs which generate nearly 50% of all profits for the company in any given quarter (Gopalakrishnan, Kessler, Scillitoe, 2010). LSI technology has also powered the development of Google Goggles, the visual search engine that can search by attributes of a photograph. Google's product management team has also said that the future of LSI technology will be to create contextual search that will present only results most relevant to a given person's interests, needs and preferences (Gopalakrishnan, Kessler, Scillitoe, 2010).
In many respects the advances Google has made on LSI technology and the future direction toward contextual search will be an even bigger impact globally than their existing innovations combined (Cho, 2009). The rapid advances in cloud computing including Google AppEngine, a cloud application development platform (Deegan, 2008) the development of Google Docs and the Google Cloud drive due out in 2012 (Brown, 2011) and the many diverse applications will all be unified through contextual search. The ability to selectively define which of these applications are best suited for a given task or need will be guided by the user interface and options in Google, further optimizing the user experience. All of these innovations taken together have made it possible for small businesses to go from being constrained by their geographic location to becoming global. These innovations have also made it possible for students to learn on a global scale, not just constrained by a given area of the country or world they happen to be attending classes at. The aggregate or strategic effect…