Former Google exec. speaks in Kitchener
Posted May 26, 2010 01:50:38 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It’s not about innovating for it’s own sake, it’s about innovating to win.
That’s the advice to a gathering of Chief Information Officers from all around the Region from one of minds that helped Google become such a success.
Former Google CIO, Douglas Merrill, was this morning’s keynote speaker at the Communitech “CIO 2K10” conference.
Merrill’s advice about good innovation, based on his very successful run at Google, includes letting the innovation process be inefficient and half-baked.
He explains, making your engineers adhere to rigid corporate guidelines and paperwork stifles creativity.
Merrill says an executive’s job is to stay out of the way and remove innovation barriers like that.
Merrill also advises to always start with your users, and see what they are doing right and wrong — that data is more important for innovation than your opinion of what your users need.
For example, by looking at how people misspelled names when using Google’s search engine, the company developed spell check searches.
Today’s conference runs until 4-pm at the Bingemans Conference Centre.
