This week The Economist reviewed the innovation processes at Google.  In "Google's Corporate Culture – Creative Tension" the magazine overviews several recent innovations, and actions senior leaders are taking regarding innovation management.

While Mr. Anthony recently chastised Google for its "immature" innovation management in a Harvard Business School blog post, and somewhat The Economist does as well, for not producing more revenue from its innovations – nobody can refute that the company released yet 3 more very important innovations this week – an updated Chrome web brower, new software that allows viewing on-line newspapers in a more natural way (Fast Flip) and Google Wave for collaborative project development.  For most companies any one of these would be vaunted to market on piles of ad and PR sending.  Products less significant cause Microsoft to throw their Marketing/PR machine into overdrive.  But innovative launches are frequent enough at Google that you can completely miss some of them.  Even when they continue to change whole industries – like Google has been doing to newspaper publishers and continues.

The best line in the article says that senior Google leadership is very actively trying to counter "the conservatism that can set in as companies mature."  The good news is that even though it has 20,000 employees, Google is not "mature."  Thankfully, it remains in the Rapids of growth.  Size does not equal "maturity."  That word is more applicable to companies that begin truncating ideas and activities to optimize their existing business.  This is the direction Scott Anthony recently proposed on his HBS blog.  And it gets companies into serious trouble.

Instead, Google is working hard to keep ideas from being truncated by hierarchy or people who are focused on narrow opportunities.  Senior leaders are making themselves available to everyone in order to make sure ideas get attention – rather than vetted.  Through this they are giving permission for ideas to be developed, even when many in the company aren't supportive.  This top-level focus on granting permission to new ideas which are unconventional is a CRITICAL component of innovation success.  Second, they aren't relying on a priority process for funding (something Mr. Anthony recommends).  Instead they are making ample dollars available for ideas to push them to market quickly – and see if the innovation is accepted by the market or needs more work. 

By personally engaging at the top levels in this process, Mr. Schmidt and his team are being Disruptive.  They aren't allowing structural impediments like strategy formulation, hiring practices, tight IT systems, large historical investments or internal "experts" to Lock-in Google to its past.  This is demonstrably exceptional behavior that pushes Google into new markets and growth.  Then, by focusing on granting permission – even for things the "organization" may not initially support – and adding resources from outside normal resource allocation systems they are doing the 2 things necessary to keep White Space alive and thriving at Google.

Google has been growing, even in this very tough economy.  More importantly, it has not slowed down its releases of innovation on the marketplace that can generate future growth.  Mobile phones using its Android software are just now getting to market, and offer (along with other innovations) potentially very large revenue gains in new areas.  With smart phones and Kindle-like e-readers to outsell PCs in late 2010 Google is squarely positioned to be part of the "next wave" of personal digital productivity (along with Apple.)  And this can be explained by the company's willingness to remain Disruptive and push White Space projects — even with 20,000 employees.