Corporate labs are funny things. Where would the valley be without Xerox PARC or America without Bell Labs? But from the corporate view they are fairly inefficient. They are a very academic environment, working at a leisurely pace, not at all like startups or even the lean-and-mean among established companies. Self-education and publication is as much a goal as improving the bottom line. Eventually the suits take notice and start reorganizing things to bring the fruits of their labor immediately to market. It happened at Bell, at PARC and at a lab where I was resident. Unfortunately, the shift in focus doesnt really work. The researchers cant shift their timelines. Partially baked ideas dont easily become marketable products and the future becomes sacrificed to the immediate.
If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google failed.
Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.
Google Labs itself is just a repository of experimental projects, not a research organization. It is not the same idea as PARC, which is a research organization.
If you want short term results, the policy of engineers working on their own pet projects 20% time is really fruitful, but the promising ones then need time and resources to become fully realized. I think thats where Google failed.
Maybe Google is inventing something better than Google Labs. I can see a successful approach being to sprout mini-labs around promising projects where the developer(s) get resources like additional developers, designers, market researchers, QA and the like. This of course sounds a lot like internal entrepreneurial startups, which havent been notably successful. I can hope that Google has something more innovative up its sleeve than the bottom line.