Innovation in Google

Executive Summary

The current paper is discussing how Google company is implementing innovative and creative management ideas in order to reach competitive advantage. It also assess different areas related to Google's implementation of innovative and creative management ideas in addition to discussing the barriers to innovations and creativity implementation in Google as well as presenting a strategy plan for communicating and overcoming barriers to innovative and creative management ideas. Google is recommended to follow a good strategy plan for facing such barriers. The company is also recommended to choose a suitable leadership style that is able to communicate innovative ideas to all stakeholders effectively. 

Introduction

Any business organization that needs to reach competitive advantage and reach boundaries of success that are not reached before should apply different implementations for creativity and innovation. Creativity and innovation can help the organization grow fast and surprise its customers with unexpected success that meets and perhaps exceeds their expectations and wishes. Empowering employees can be effective in encouraging them to innovate and be creative Innovation is a vital aspect of the organization's strategy and should be an important part of its strategic plan as innovation can turn the organization's products from obsolete ones to attractive ones. The current paper is discussing how Google company is adopting creative and innovation techniques in order to reach success. Google company is a great internet based company that is based on its search drive Google that provides different online services for customers from all over the world including mail service, advertising services, search services and others. The company focuses on providing its customers with the best user experience through their browsers, Gmail, Google Adsense, Google books, Google Translate, Google Earth and other services as the company is keen to innovate and keep creative to ensure its success and top position in the digital market. (Google, 2016)  

AC 1.1: Evaluate current creative and innovative management processes in an organization

Innovation in a business organization depends on the its management as according to Birkinshaw and Hamel, (2008), innovation is not only delivering new products to the market but it also represents new processes in managing the business and radical changes that are based on fresh ideas of doing things rather than the usual ideas as well as intelligent methods for managing the business activities. Innovation management is an important part of management because it supports the business organizations and guides them towards the most proper means of innovation. Portfolio management is also needed to manage innovations in business organizations because it consists of three main components that help the organization handle innovation well; they are the incremental process that helps analyze the organization and find out the best innovative ideas related to it, the second is the radical process that is used for finding advanced implementations that uses technology to innovate in the organization and the fundamental process that uses completely different technology.

Google creative and innovative management processes

Google is an organized business organization that is based on innovating in new products and services as it has different search engine websites such as Google that was innovated to be Google Chrome and video sharing websites such as You Tube with its innovated channel owing services, it has other services and products such as its advertising systems including Google AdWards and Google AdSense and 'double click', Google Earth, Google Books, Google Play, Google+ and the continuous innovations the company is doing on these products to make them suitable to the age changes. Google has replaced its incremental process in launching new products with the new 70-20-10 principal which is according to Savoia and Patrick Copeland, (2011) depends on spending 70% of Google's time on search engines and adds while 20% of it spent on technical issues and 10% on crazy ideas.  

AC 1.2: Explain how to lead others to positively embrace innovation and change

According to Schoemaker and Krupp, (2013) leadership is a systematic procedure that is used for influencing team members for achieving specific goals. Leadership has the quality of guiding individuals to achieve specific objectives and goals as the leaders have to find out different techniques of motivating the individuals and directing them towards innovating new creative ideas that help the business and achieve desirable changes.  

Google leadership 

Google depends on leadership greatly in order to embrace innovation and change by employees working there through those effective leaders who are able to solve problems effectively, motivate employees, communicate well with stakeholders and make change understandable by employees who need to apply it. Google is a great organization with about 20.000 employee working under leaders who follow different leadership styles in order to lead and manage change and innovations that help the company boost the market and threaten its competitors. Google tries to apply different leadership styles especially the transformational leadership that is mainly followed for leading employees to apply change and to encourage them to be innovative and creative as transformational leaders are more able than others to communicate changes and innovations with employees.  It is found that Larry Page has adapted the transformational leadership style in order to present a role model for an expected CEO who can lead change effectively by raising employees' morale and encouraging them to be creative. Google posted third-quarter 2014 earnings that marked a 20% year-over-year increase, and among other successes from its vast array of products and services, Google now commands more than 2 million internet searches per second. But it’s more than the numbers Page and his company put up. It’s the way he follows for getting people to perform very well. Another example on the influence of the CEO in Google is Eric Schmidt who also was transformational and was able to solve crisis and conflicts among the staff which helped increase employees' innovations and made them able to work in different work conditions and even under pressure. Balzac, (2015)

AC 2.1 Assess the influence of vision and mission on generation of creative and innovative  management processes in an organization

According to Kottler, (2012) a vision is the organization's desired view of the future. The vision has within some main goals that have to be achieved on the long term based on a number of processes to be done in the organization. A mission is the current situation of the business organization as well as its future plans based on its vision. There is a great influence of the vision and mission on the company's ability in generating creative and innovative management processes as both the vision and mission can inspire the workforce of the company and direct them for specific innovative and creative goals and make them understand how to be creative and innovative by their identification of goals and declaring the company's needs and ambitions. In Google, the vision is to organize the information around the world to enable it be accessible and manageable by all people. Google's vision is based on understanding the needs of customers and trying to present more useful products such as innovating Google Scholar from Google Books as the company is trying to facilitate information access on its customers by innovation strategy involved within its vision and mission. Google's mission statement defines its business sector which is software and it identifies the company's stakeholders which helps in presenting the more effective software for those stakeholder and innovating in them such as innovating the Google Play service and delivering different useful software and programs that match with all stakeholders' needs. This is the role of the company's innovative management which is a part of the company's strategic management as according to Bruton and White, (2010) the development of the company's vision and mission statements is an important part of the company's strategic management process. When there is a clear defining for the vision and mission of the organization, managers are able to set strategic objectives and innovative objectives that are aligned with the long term goals of the company. Managers turn these objectives into an operational strategy that can be applied, controlled and evaluated. The vision and mission here can help the organization find the proper approaches for innovation.

AC 2.2: Use analytical tools to identify potential creative and innovative management ideas

There are different factors that affect the organization's management and make it turn more innovative such as development and training of employees, team work, effective leadership, culture of the organization, creative climate and the organization's vision and mission. Google depends on development and training of its employees in order to motivate them and train them to use innovative ideas effectively with the help of the shared vision and the leadership. SWOT analysis can be a good analytical tool for identifying the potential creative and innovative management ideas of Google as follows: 

SWOT Analysis

Strengths -A brand that has a very brilliant reputation based on speed, user friendly and high quality services. -Having multi functionality and fast coping with clients' needs. -Variety of services and innovative ideas such as Google analytics and Google maps based on previous services that achieved success such as Google books and Google Earth. -Mastering new technological innovative ideas. -Owning social media sites such as Facebook and You Tube. -Ease of use of search engines rather than other search engines such as Internet explorer or Yahoo. -Having a free working corporate culture with no discrimination tendencies. -Keeping current products used along with innovated products such as Google search engine kept with Google Chrome. ·         ·

Weaknesses ·     - weaknesses may include the ability of penetrating some Google accounts and accessing to personal information of users. –Poor abilities in detecting the original contents. –Poor popularity of some Google products such as Google Scholar and Google+. - - -    ·

Opportunities -Providing more needed advances and amendments on the current products by the help of the great innovation management of the company. -Having the top sales rates in the digital online market and the more used products. -Motivating current employees to provide more innovations. -Increasing the speed of search and keeping the current speed stable. (Pahl and Richter, 2009)

Threats ·      -the existence o strong competitors such as Opera, Yahoo, Bing, Firefox and others. –The threat of Microsoft company on Google and the sever competition between the two companies. –threat of not finding new innovations and creative ideas in the current or new employees and managers. -

AC 2.3: Assess risks and benefits of creative and innovative management ideas

Creative and innovative processes are usually associated with both risk and benefits as they are the two expected results for them. Risk can occur as a result of lack of enough information about the important decisions, lack of ownership, poor goals that are not clearly identified and lack of study and analysis before taking the risky decisions. In Google; innovation strategy is based on one insight and two main innovations. The insight of Google helped it from risk and brought high benefits resulting from innovation, it was when web pages grew in number, the internet’s potential of information resource was better than all other resources for everything. People valued better search results. Google’s first innovation was its PageRank system that was developed in 1995 as it was a type of algorithm for internet searches that provided better results than all other search engines. The second innovation was Google's business model innovation, as it led to a financial success to the company. Selling advertising space related to key words that Google users looked for was great and brought a multi-billion dollar profit machine. The idea was well studied by leaders of Google and surprising competitors raised the benefits over the risk taken by applying the two innovations. Google's collaboration with YouTube was a success but the company tried to keep rules and laws by its control system and privacy policy that ensured all rights of the users as well as the company so as to avoid risks associated with any fraud or bad video contents. The company also dealt with the different laws of different countries that can cause risks with legal readiness by understanding these laws and regulations and having the legal persons who are ready to deal with them to avoid legal problems. When Google found that some services don't present the expected benefits from them, the company stopped the service such as Google Answers. This policy reflects how far the company can avoid risks from innovation and creative ideas and got the utmost benefits from them. (Ross, 2015)    

AC 2.4: Use change models to support the implementation of creative and innovative management ideas

There are different change models that can be applied in order to support creative and innovative management ideas such as the ADKAR change model that depends on five main stages of change implementation which are Awareness, Desire, Knowledge, Ability and Reinforcement. It can be helpful in the development of innovative management ideas as all stakeholders can be involved within the change process in order to understand the innovations and creative management ideas applied by the organization. (Hiatt, 2006) Another model that can be more suitable to Google is the Norwell IDEAL change model as follows:

Investigation: The investigation stage depends on initiating innovative ideas such as those presented by Google as Google earth / Google Maps to be used for identifying locations by maps in the whole world.

Diagnosis: Google spent 20% of its whole time in innovations as Google's CEO diagnoses problems in the meetings he makes with staffs the interviews about innovative ideas so as to discuss them and find out challenges and solutions for them. 

Engaging: Google tries to engage all stakeholders in its innovations such as engaging employees and clients. Google established its 30 R&D centres in main countries such as US, Canada, India, Japan and Russia. These centres try to engage people in the new products and provide information about them when needed.

Acting: Acting refers to the real implementation of innovative products by Google as the company takes serious actions regarding innovated ideas such as launching Google+ to boost the social media sites and launching the Android applications such as Google Play to make it suitable for many and most mobile brands and systems.

Learning: Google developed its Google learning academy in 2006 as the academy is used for teaching Google employees about new and innovated technology and its usage and values. Google presented the service of certifying teachers to be Google certified teachers. (Maxwell, 2009)

AC 3.1: Produce an appropriate rationale to persuade stakeholders of an organization of the benefits of a creative and innovative management idea

Stakeholders: stakeholders are according to Mathur et al, (2007) are all people interested and related to the business organization and they are highly influenced by the events and decisions taken in the business organization as they may be a group of people or specific individuals or organizations related to the business. Then following table includes the main components that relate stakeholders to innovation management:

Phase	Outcome	Methods
Stakeholder overview	Stakeholders evaluation	Setting issues process and presentation
Stakeholders analysis	Great power and interest of stakeholders	stakeholder matrix preparing
Stakeholders plan	Strong stakeholders communication	Engagement plans and communication with stakeholders
Stakeholders management	Strong stakeholders relationship management	Awareness plan for stakeholders