Google\'s Strategy Is to Deliver High Quality

Google's strategy is to deliver high quality content that drives advertising revenue online. This strategy is supported by a high level of innovation, by offering end users (web surfers) high value content. Google believes that content is critical to providing value, which attracts users, and those users can then be sold to advertisers (Google, 2013).

The learning and growth objective is important to Google, because of the company's reliance on innovation as a source of competitive advantage. As a result, Google invests heavily in its employees (Stewart, 2013). Google enhances its advertising with business intelligence -- better matches between customers and advertisers, and better knowledge of customers. As a result, Google relies on innovation to find ways to automate the data gathering and business intelligence processing processes. Learning and growth highlights how Google can add value for its customers through internal learning processes (BSI, 2013).

Three objectives for Google with respect to the learning and growth objective are to increase knowledge of customers and users, to increase the value of the firm's intellectual property and to increase the quality of its employees. These are all factors that will affect the company's output, especially with respect to innovation. Each of these can be measured to evaluate the success of Google against these learning and growth objectives.

The best way to measure whether a firm has been successful with respect to increasing its business intelligence with respect to users and customers is to analyze how many data points it has for these, and how fine the data is. The company has metrics for these that it uses to sell to its customers. These metrics can be improved -- generally more information and finer information would be considered to be an improvement.

With respect to increasing the value of the firm's intellectual property, there are two measures here. The first is the number of patents that the company has, and the second is the value of the firm's intangible assets, many of which comprise intellectual property. The latter is governed by financial accounting principles and therefore is consistent year over year. The number of patents should be increasing over time, and the company might also want to set targets for the number of patents in a specific product or service area.

The best way to measure the quality of the employees with respect to learning might be the average number of years of schooling, or a combination of years of schooling and experience in the workforce. For a firm that wants to be innovative, this measure might not be the best one since it measures seniority more than innovation potential, but it does highlight that the workforce with more experience or education is either more talented on average from the outset or has a high level of expertise in the workforce.