At Google, 20% time is core to our culture and today’s Reader release incorporates features developed by two engineers in their 20% time. #
Wonderful company policy.
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Can they do anything they want in these 20%?
I also love the story of how Google Reader came to exist. It was a side project necessary to test a parser, which then accidentally became a 20% project and ended up as a full Google product.
Seems to me like this 20% thing isn’t all that great.
Michael, as far as I know, they have to verify that it is relevant somehow.
Guy, yeah, I’m very happy they decided to bring Reader to life.
Josue, why?
I think the 20 pct. time is a great idea as Google will attract entrepreneurs this way. This is worth a lot for a company like google. They need to develop new ideas and stay ahead of the field.
I wish more companies would have this policy, but you need a company of some size and ambition to do this.
Hey,
I’ve always loved this idea and I can see heaps of potential benefits. I’d be very eager for my organization to adopt a similar policy. However we are a consulting company (i.e. we build websites). Google is a product company and a strong heavyweight player in the market. They can take bigger risks and have many other profitable sectors. 20% time in our company is time lost on Client projects.
A trial could be on the cards. I already have a whole bunch of projects at the back of my mind. You would also have to make it pretty clear that any technology/IP an employee develops remains the sole property of the company.
Rob
It is a seriously great policy – insist your employess devote 20% of their time to innovation? Now that’s forward thinking.
2c.
I think Google is an exception, is an utopia company.
I run a small IT company, and myself and my employees spend at least 20% of our time working on “internal” projects that make everything else more efficient. For example, we use the DotNetNuke CMS to build some of our websites. I spent some time creating an automated skin builder tool that cut the design and skinning time from 4 – 5 hours down to about 1 hour.
IT companies in general have the brainpower and the flexibility to do some of these things. My company in particular has a pretty broad skill set that I’ve tapped into to create some pretty cool things. They aren’t on the level of the Google Reader or some of the other 20% projects coming out of the Plex, but they’re still cool.
IT companies innovate – that’s what we do and who we are, and Google is very cool for doing the 20% thing.
I personally think it’s great too… A great way to move forward whilst not devoting too much, if you get what i mean? Google shake things up often, wouldn’t surprise me if they changed that soon… haha.