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EFTA00706589 | EFTA00706610 August 28, 2013 -- Published reports in recent weeks indicate that Googly has been cracking down on employees' "20% time"—the policy of letting Googlers spend a fifth of their time working on whatever innovative, maybe even crazy, projects they wished. The news was a shocker. Google had widely touted its 20% time as a cornerstone of its "innovation machine." Larry Page and Sergey Brin also cited 20% time as leading to many of Google's "most significant advances." These include Gmail, Google News and Adsense—and that last one accounts for a quarter of Google's $50 billion-plus in annual revenue. Founders Page and Brin, together with ex-CEO Eric Schmidt, reportedly used 20% time personally. Google's current top brass seems to have forgotten, or to have misunderstood, the reasons for the company's success. Continuous innovation is one of the hardest tricks in business. Sustaining it over decades has proved impossible for all but a select few, such as 3M or W.L. Gore & Associates, the makers of Gore-Tex. One can't just throw money and bodies at innovation—there is no correlation between the size of a company's budget and its innovation rate. Most ideas are bad ones, so you have to entertain a lot of them to find the real gems. According to academic research, a company, on average, needs 3,000 ideas to get 300 of them formalized, 125 of them into small experimentation, 10 of them officially budgeted, 1.7 launched—and one that makes money. Those are long odds. So naturally many executives seek to "optimize" these dynamics. They decide on, say, 10 official projects to favor. This kills most of the informal ideas, which employees just keep to themselves—or bring to a competitor. What's more, it is extremely unlikely that people at the top know in advance which ideas are going to be the big winners. At 3M and Gore, it is their employees' initiatives that have introduced them to new markets. Take Gore's Elixir guitar strings—which started as an employee's informal idea for an innovative bike-gear cable. Today Elixir is a market leader, and one of 1,000 new products the company has successfully launched since it invented Gore-Tex in 1969. Seen in this light, freeing up time for innovation is not just another on-thejob perk. It is a token of respect that offers room for personal growth and a degree of autonomy to employees, regardless of what their "day job" is. On paper, a step like Google's possible elimination of 20% time might look like it saves money. But the signal it sends is that management, not the EFTA00706610
May 5, 2026 at 12:54 PM