For Innovation: Small is Perfect!

As you may know we do many collaborations with innovative companies, and there's one thing we've learnt ... when we deal with a small company and they want to collaborate ... it will happen.

With a large company, you can have many meetings, with lots of people involved, and often it doesn't go anywhere. Small companies innovate as they need to, whereas big companies are often risk averse.

A large company often doesn't trust its engineers to make sensible judgements on business decisions, which is actually not the case, as many of the most successful IT companies are run by those who have developed through a technical route. Companies like HP, especially in their earlier days, and Google have made their name by excellence in technology, rather than being focused on business objectives.

Built on Technical Excellence

A cool widget and a new piece of Javascript was always of more interest to Google than a strong business case in the corporate world. Google and Apple have thus focused on the end user, while most of the others in the industry have concentrated on corporate customers, and have built up their business cases of these.

Apple's reputation, for example, is mainly due to their excellence in technical things, where their systems, while looking beautiful, are actually engineered to the highest standards possible. Anyone who has used an Apple computer quickly realises that there is a lot of technology and smart thinking that has gone into creating their systems. Apple sell on quality, and gain their reputation on it, and not from hype or in following others.

Large companies too can forget about end-customer engagement, and keep everything secret, as they are so scared that their ideas will be stolen, thus the innovations never get a chance to be focused on strong use cases. For an SMEs, their innovations are often part of their engagements with customers, and it is there that they are formed. The skill is then to scale this innovation out, so that it is relevant to a wide range of stakeholders.

Large companies often start from a large scope of stakeholders, and create a product which is too wide-ranging and doesn't really address anyone's specific issue. Google, unlike many large companies, pinpoint rapid prototypes and do them well, and see what works and what doesn't. I saw a recent presentation from Skyscanner who seemed to have a similar type of approach to innovation, where innovative ideas were rolled out quickly as prototypes and were evaluated on their success.

Risk averse

Eventually as a company grows they put in place checks and balances to make sure that they do not expose themselves to too much risk. So the management structure becomes formalised, and ideas often fail to be taken forward.

So we see Google taking steps to overcome their nightmare:

a company made up to mangers.

Why? A bureaucratic structure stifles innovation and tramples on smart people.  So Google are breaking up the company under a company named Alphabet.

Google itself is not a search engine anymore. From standing starts in many areas it tries things out, and put the resources in place for those that show potential. For example it managed to create one of the most popular operating systems in the world: Android, by basically adopting two industry standards: Java and Linux, and making them work on mobile devices.

A key part of its innovation infrastructure is that it takes risks, and follows through, and drops those that don't work. It wants to give independence of thought to its innovators and technical leaders, without over burdening them with issues from other areas. The model is thus similar to a traditional academic research model, where academics with smart ideas gain resources based on them pushing forward in new areas.

If it works, the university becomes a leader in the area. Any university who suppresses their talented researchers and imposes a hierarchy structure on resource allocation will eventually lose its lead ... academia thrives on new seeds coming through, and Professors must support in reducing burocratic processes.

Thinner and flatter

In any organisation the more layers that someone has to go through, the slower the pace becomes, and many organisations are moving towards a flatter management infrastructure, and giving control to core groups. My own university, for example, is now getting rid of Faculty's towards a flatter School infrastructure, as facilities can add extra layers of management, and where innovation and enterprise can often struggle to get through the intermediate layers of management and strategic planning. Good work at the lower levels can also be hidden when the auditing entity is a merger of ones of which some are doing well, and others not so well. The good performers should be nourished, and the less well should be helped.

Small works in software

Google, as any company, thus wants to attract the best technical leads into research labs, and must create an infrastructure where they are not burdened by every increasing levels of bureaucracy. It is also able to back-up its promise with the required funding levels to support the thought-leaders. A rising star can be given their own unit to run, without the need to rise through the formalised hierarchies that many companies have.

There's a feeling that large companies don't to software as well as smaller ones. In the UK there have been so many IT contract disasters, including spending over ￡10 billion of an IT system for the NHS, and which was never rolled-out. Overall it was littered with bad advice and legacy systems, with a lack of real software integration across teams.

What would a small company have done differently? They would have searched around for the best and most scalable solution around, and select that. For the large companies involved, they already had off-the-shelf solutions which were filled with legacy software, and pushed these. The companies involved also spend must of their money on design and requirements analysis, and it was years down the line before anyone could see anything real, and by the time it goes to the people who really mattered ... clinical staff ... it had produced something that was a computer programmers dream and not theirs.  This approach would be too risky for an SME, so they would prototype and mock-up versions that would be used in real-life environments, and where they could observe who it worked, and then use that as their design. 

Keeping up with Grandad

Google still feels like a small company in the way they implement things, and they need to keep this feel if they are to succeed in the way that a 100-year-old business has: IBM.

IBM have managed to keep pace and innovate, especially in disruptive markets [here], but Google is a different company, and must stay true to their roots in order to attract the best talent around. Money and financial rewards are unimportant in world of innovation ... getting the best talent is the only way to go ... and as much as possible we need to clear the way for them to push things forward.

For IBM and Microsoft they have a whole lot of business contacts which sustains their business, and the need to innovate is lessened, as they are just fixing and improving on existing things, but for Google, innovation must be at the heart of everything, and individuals are at the heart of that.

Reputations built on people

Look at some of the leaders in academia ... for Crypto ... think Royal Holloway ... and think of the infrastructure that Prof Fred Piper created there. Do you think that the University of Edinburgh's Informatics Group would be where they are now without the guidance of Sidney Michaelson? In 1966 he became the first Professor of Computing in the University of Edinburgh, and also lead the new Computing Department. 

So, in conclusion, big companies need to act as small ones, and give the opportunity for innovation and risk taking to thrive. Our enterprise infrastructure must continue to support the individuals who do not want to conform to strict rules and procedures, and who have the vision to see the future! Remember Apple were a garage company once, and Microsoft had to borrow someone else's operating system to get a foot on the ladder. For academia, universities must aim to attract the best, and buffer them from the usual bureaucracy that any large organisation has. 

Well done

So ... well done Google ... I trust you as a fellow technical bod! As I company I have trusted virtually everything that you have done, as you feel as if you have the end customer in mind, and that you have kept to your core technical excellence, without getting mired with a strong corporate ethic.

You have pushed forward, and made an impact, and don't shout about it. You do still seem to be basically a bunch of software developers, who just love to code, and that's not an easy thing for a company that virtually created the Web.