Jonathan Rosenberg On Rules To Foster Innovation

Jonathan Rosenberg was Google Inc. Senior Vice President. Prior to joining Google in 2002, he was a founding member of @Home's product group and served as Senior Vice President after the merger of @Home and Excite. Prior to that, he managed the eWorld product line for Apple Computer. And prior to that, he was the director of product marketing for Knight Ridder Information Services.

Jonathan Rosenberg:

Fostering innovation, 5 rules. So how do we foster this innovation? Most companies manage creativity in order to manage risk, that just doesn't work. Do we have an artist here today? Go do your art from 10 to 12 and be very creative, 12 to 4 is the management meeting. It doesn't work. Innovation comes from creativity, creativity cannot be managed, it can be allocated, it can be budgeted, it can be measured, it can be tracked and encouraged, but it can't be dictated.

Innovation rule 2. Create a culture of yes based on optimism and big thinking. Organizations developed anti-bodies to change, that's why big companies stop innovating. If you're the innovator you're like the virus, the anti-bodies wanna kill you. Many people think it's their function to do nothing but say "thou shalt not". Leaders protect people from anti-bodies, your focus should be thou shalt. Create a spirit of optimism, pessimist don't change the world.

Innovation rule 3. Never stop someone from moving forward with their good idea because you have a better one. There's a bull market for innovation, and a Darwinian process for reading out the bad ideas. You will do best by simply encouraging all of them. The best will win and the others will fail. Thomas Edison said: " Have a great idea, have a lot of them."

Innovation rule 4. A leader's job is not to prevent risks but to build the capability to recover when failures occur. There is no such thing as a good failure and a bad failure. Or there is such a thing as a good failure and a bad failure. A good one happens quickly, and it provides plenty lessons. Sometimes you have to look at these lessons in the data. A bad failure takes a long time and you don't learn anything. Leaders don't prevent failures, they prevent bad failures.

Innovation rule 5. A good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Whenever the public endorse a crisis, ordinary citizens start to wonder how and whether our institutions really work. We no longer take things for granted. It is only then change becomes possible. Many management challenges are in fact teaching moments. The crisis is the built-in narrative, so use it.

Google's Larry Page & Sergey Brin on Stanford's Tradition of Innovation

Larry Page:

I'm Larry Page, I'm Co-founder and CEO of GOOGLE. I was at Stanford from 1995 through 1998. I studied computer science. I was in the PhD program there at Stanford. I did not quite graduate, but I did get my Masters degree.

Sergey Brin:

I'm Sergey Brim, I'm from GOOGLE, and prior to that I was a PhD student at Stanford. Larry and I first met when he came to visit during the PhD recruitment weekend, he started a couple of years after I did, and we became good friends. When he actually agreed to join and came on-board, we experimented a variety of things, we had some shared interest, and Larry had this crazy idea that he was gonna download all the links on the web and then do something with them. It wasn't entirely clear, what we did find that the world create applications, and one of them was SEARCH, which eventually became GOOGLE.

Larry Page:

GOOGLE, it's an interesting story actually, and it's a good example of the benefits of really having pure research. We had no idea of what we wanted to do, we were interested in doing research and I had lots of crazy things I wanted to do, and my adviser actually turn to one of us, why don't you link the sites on the web, that sounds like a good thing to work on.
I think the culture of Stanford with regards to entrepreneurship and high tech industry have been really amazing, and I was really attracted to Stanford for that reason, but I also... just tremendous expertise and how to make companies, how to get invasions out into the world, that i think has really meaningful impact.

Sergey Brin:

I think Stanford is a really unique place, and if you look it at an entrepreneurial point of view, the history, looking at Hewlett Packard, Sun Microsystems, Cisco, Yahoo!, Excite, it's really braided an enormous number of very important companies in the technology world, and I don't think it's an accident, I think that there's a culture of entrepreneurship at Stanford on a scale that I haven't seen elsewhere. 

Larry Page:

Universities have struggled a lot of times to get these tremendous discoveries and advancements, out from academia into the real world, and that was one of the things I guess for me, while I was really excited to be at Stanford, that's something Stanford's been really successful at, and has changed the world many times.

Sergey Brin:

I personally I love New York City, I'm there pretty often. It has an energy and dynamic to it that I think my mind kind of resonates with the different kind of energy and dynamic that Stanford has. But I think one of the things that is missing is this top notch university industry symbiosis. I don't think I've seen the same kind of scale in research and commercialization, pretty much unaware outside of Stanford, and I think that this is really a great opportunity for both the city as well as Stanford University to broaden it's horizons.